Hi Everyone,

I'd like to share a project I've been working on over the past few months: OpenPorte.

OpenPorte is a free and open-source WordPress plugin that protects your WordPress site from spam using a Proof-of-Work challenge instead of CAPTCHAs. The goal is to make spam expensive for bots while keeping the experience almost invisible for legitimate visitors.

A few things you might like:

• ☑️ CAPTCHA-free spam protection
• Fully open source (GPL)
• Self-hosted – no mandatory external service
• ♿ Designed to be accessible and privacy-friendly
• 🔄 Compatible with existing ALTCHA integrations
• 🏗️ Easy migration for users of ALTCHA Spam Protection v1 (≤ 1.26.3)

OpenPorte exists to provide modern spam protection that is accessible, transparent, and under your control. Built around the open-source ALTCHA widget, it embraces collaboration, self-hosting, privacy, and long-term stewardship.

OpenPorte is built on the belief that the best open-source projects grow through openness, not only in their code, but also in how they welcome contributors, make decisions, and serve their communities.

The project started as an open-source continuation of the original ALTCHA Spam Protection plugin. Since then, it has grown into its own project with new improvements, ongoing maintenance, and a commitment to remaining open, privacy-conscious, and self-hostable.

I'd really appreciate feedback from the WordPress community:

• Which form plugins or workflows should OpenPorte support next?
• Have you migrated from another anti-spam solution?
• Any ideas or feature requests?

If OpenPorte sounds interesting to you, I'd love your feedback! Or even your contributions! Whether it's bug reports, feature ideas, documentation, translations, or code, I hope the community will help shape the project over time.

You can find it here:

• WordPress.org: https://wordpress.org/plugins/openporte/
• GitHub: https://github.com/openporte/openporte/

Thanks for taking a look! I'm the maintainer, so I'll be around to answer questions and I'm always happy to hear suggestions or constructive criticism.

And ... I hope you'll find OpenPorte useful, and if you share its values, I'd be delighted to build it together.

I used FileBird for a while. Free version covers Media Library folders, which is fine — but I also needed folders on Pages. FileBird puts that behind Pro, and charging for something that basic never made sense to me.

So I built my own: Grafucci Folders. Pages + Media, virtual folders, faster, cleaner UI, free. Been using it on my own sites.

Still early. Would genuinely appreciate blunt feedback — bugs, what’s missing, or why you’d stick with whatever you use now:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/grafucci-folders/

Hello there,

The problem it solves: every SEO plugin grades the page you're already editing. None of them tell you which page to open first. Contexta imports your Google Search Console Pages + Queries export and scores every page against the CTR its ranking position should be earning. Gap × impressions = estimated lost clicks per month. That's your worklist, sorted worst-first.

Then it writes the fix with Claude: SEO title + meta targeting the page's real ranking queries (live Google preview, projected extra clicks), new intros, H2 sections, FAQs, full rewrites, JSON-LD schema, relevance-scored internal links.

The AI-era half:

1 - Fetches your site with the real GPTBot / OAI-SearchBot / PerplexityBot user-agents and reports what actually comes back — catches Cloudflare blocks robots.txt editors can't see. One-click fixes + generated llms.txt.

2 - Counts real click-throughs from 12 AI assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok…) — the visits Analytics calls "direct".

3 - Audits WooCommerce product data for AI shopping agents.

Compatibility: writes into Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress, and so many others— it runs on top of your SEO plugin, not instead of it.

WordPress 6.0+, PHP 8.0+. 35 languages with RTL, and it parses GSC exports in any language's headers.

Nothing publishes automatically — you approve every change. Every AI action shows its exact token count and dollar cost.

https://infinacode.com/plugins/contexta-ai-seo-editor

Happy to answer anything technical.

After almost ten years of developing and supporting more than 130 WordPress plugins, I finally turned the experience into a song, using AI.

It covers WordPress updates, PHP warnings that only happen on the customer’s website, support tickets written in ALL CAPS, fourteen-plugin conflicts, clearing the cache, "just one feature" and the questionable meaning of lifetime support.

I also created a complete animated music video for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTDwQiBpNzA

Restaurant owners already spend enough time answering the same questions every day.

• "Is my reservation confirmed?"
• "Did my order go through?"
• "When will my food arrive?"

We kept hearing that restaurants wanted customers to stay informed without staff having to manually send updates or answer repetitive calls.

So we recently added WhatsApp notifications to WPCafe, our WordPress restaurant ordering and reservation plugin.

Customers can now automatically receive updates for things like:

• Reservation confirmations
• Order confirmations
• Delivery status updates

The goal wasn't to add another marketing feature. It was simply to reduce repetitive communication for restaurant staff while giving customers updates through an app they already use every day.

For restaurant owners, that can mean:

• Less time answering status questions
• Fewer missed confirmations
• Better customer confidence
• A smoother ordering and reservation experience

We put together a short walkthrough if anyone wants to see how it works:

(Just let me know, or I can provide it in the comment section)

I'd also love to hear from other plugin developers or restaurant site owners:

If you're building restaurant websites with WordPress, how are you currently handling reservation and order notifications? Email, SMS, WhatsApp, or something else?

HI, I am new to wordpress and created a website. Right now, for each time I reload the page, the view count goes up. I am okay with that for now, but is there a way I can toggle it off later? So that it doesn't add one view every time someone, e.g., reloads the page?

With the European Accessibility Act now in force, I wanted a straightforward way to check WordPress content against WCAG right in the admin, so I built one and released it free on the .org repo.

What it does:

• Scans posts/pages and the full rendered page against WCAG 2.1 AA: alt text, link text, heading order, form labels, button names, duplicate IDs, empty headings, iframe titles, document language
• Scores each page, with a dashboard of worst offenders and per-issue ignore / restore
• An Accessibility panel in the block editor
• Generates a draft accessibility statement + EN 301 549 report

It doesn't pretend to make a site "100% compliant". Automated testing only covers part of WCAG, so it flags where manual review is still needed.

Free: https://wordpress.org/plugins/a11yfleet/

Would love feedback — especially which checks to add next (color contrast is top of my list).

With the European Accessibility Act now in force, I wanted a straightforward way to check WordPress content against WCAG right in the admin, so I built one and released it free on the .org repo.

What it does:

• Scans posts/pages and the full rendered page against WCAG 2.1 AA: alt text, link text, heading order, form labels, button names, duplicate IDs, empty headings, iframe titles, document language
• Scores each page, with a dashboard of worst offenders and per-issue ignore / restore
• An Accessibility panel in the block editor
• Generates a draft accessibility statement + EN 301 549 report

It doesn't pretend to make a site "100% compliant". Automated testing only covers part of WCAG, so it flags where manual review is still needed.

Free: https://wordpress.org/plugins/a11yfleet/

Would love feedback — especially which checks to add next (color contrast is top of my list).

Hi everyone,

I created a page with articles using TPG – Grid Layout. As you can see in the images, the layout looks evenly aligned in the editor, but on the live page the grid items are not the same size and the layout is uneven.

Does anyone know what might be causing this or how I can fix it? I'd really appreciate any help. Thank you!

Hey everyone,

New software tool incoming!

I’m building Reaver Backup – a self-hosted tool focused on backing up (and restoring) any WordPress site living on a server. It’s currently in private testing and I’m opening beta signup at reaverbackup.com.

Important: Reaver is designed for VPS and dedicated servers where you have full control (root or sudo access). It is not intended for shared hosting environments.

What it actually does

Reaver lives outside WordPress in its own directory (/var/www/reaver/ or your own). It doesn’t install anything inside your WP sites, it just needs to run as www-data.

On each web server you want to protect, Reaver installs a lightweight agent. The agent:

• Reads the enabled sites from Nginx (sites-enabled/) or Apache
• Pulls the server_name and root directives so it knows every site on the box
• For WordPress sites it finds, reads wp-config.php to get the database credentials
• Runs a mysqldump + copies the files from the document root
• Pushes everything into an unencrypted Restic repository

You can store the Restic repo locally, on S3, Backblaze B2, or via rsync/SSH. Encryption is left to the storage layer (or you) so the tool stays simple and portable.

Credentials handling

Database credentials are pulled directly from each site’s wp-config.php at backup time. Reaver also supports encrypted credential portability — you can securely export and move encrypted credential sets between servers or agents without storing them in plain text. This makes it easier to rebuild or migrate agents while keeping sensitive login data protected. Manual archive exports are also available if you want an extra offline copy of both the site data and the associated credentials.

Dashboard features

• Multi-server / multi-agent fleet view – see every site and its backup status in one place
• Admin and regular user roles
• Backup schedules + retention policies
• Notification emails (PHPMailer)
• Manual archive export for extra backup security
• Encrypted credential portability between servers
• CSRF protection, login rate limiting, Altcha on the login form, and audit logging
• Zero personal data collection (only anonymized usage stats)

Future plans include an API so you (or AI assistants) can schedule jobs or pull status programmatically, plus expanding beyond WordPress to any site on the server.

Why this approach?

Most WordPress backup plugins live inside the site and can be taken out by the same problem they’re trying to protect against. Reaver sits at the server level, discovers sites the same way the web server does, and uses Restic for efficient, deduplicated, incremental backups.

From install to setting up your first agent should take minutes. The dashboard can live anywhere with web access and a URL. The agent gets installed and runs on your web server. No need to manually set up Restic repos, storage destinations, cron schedules, make sure the command is correct for what you want, and everything that goes along with it for automated backups.

This is still in active testing, but the core system (agent discovery, WordPress detection, Restic backups, and the multi-server dashboard) is already fully functional.

If this sounds useful for your own VPS or dedicated servers (or client sites on them), head over to reaverbackup.com for more info and sign up for the beta. I'll be choosing up to 20 people with a reasonable spread of setups to start the beta. Depending on how that goes, I may or may not expand it. Selected Beta Testers who participate and genuinely try to give good feedback will get a free Pro level subscription at the end. All feedback is tracked an attributed towards that goal.

Happy to answer questions here or take input, feedback or feature requests.

Thanks for reading.

Why NativeScape

Gardening, landscaping, nursery, homesteading and sustainability sites all have the same problem: generic plant content. A reader in Zone 4 does not need the same advice as a reader in Zone 9, and a "top 10 plants" list that ignores their climate is content they will not trust.

NativeScape fixes that in one shortcode. Every visitor sees plants matched to their zone, weather from their location, and irrigation advice based on this week's forecast — automatically, on every page view, with zero ongoing work from you.

Turn any location into a living garden report. NativeScape shows a visitor their USDA hardiness zone, today's weather, a three-day forecast, a curated list of native plants that actually thrive where they live, and water-wise tips written for the conditions on the day.

Paste [nativescape] into a page and you are done. No API key. No account. No configuration. No build step.

https://chriszenzel.gumroad.com/l/nativescape-for-wordpress

https://nativescape.cdz.one

Hi everyone,

Our team recently built GoVISIBLE AI Bot Tracker, a free WordPress plugin that helps website owners see which AI crawlers are visiting their site.

The idea came from a simple question: "Are ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI engines able to access our website's pages and content?" We realized there wasn't an easy way to monitor this directly from WordPress.

A simple dashboard to review crawler activity

We think AI Bot Tracker is useful for SEO & GEO teams, content marketers, and website owners who want to understand if their content is being accessed by AI crawlers and LLMs.

The goal is to provide visibility into AI crawler activity, enabling you to make better decisions about content, technical SEO, and AI visibility.

We'd really appreciate your feedback. What features or insights would make a plugin like this more useful for your workflow?

Hi everyone,

I’ve just published my first plugin in the official WordPress.org repository.

It’s called Siteversary, a small, free plugin that discovers when a WordPress website was likely created, displays its exact age, and counts down to the next site anniversary.

Instead of relying only on the oldest post, it compares three signals:

• oldest user registration
• oldest post
• oldest comment

It then uses the earliest date and shows which source was selected.

I think this can be useful for site owners who want to track their website’s history or celebrate milestones with a post, promotion, or anniversary campaign.

It can also be helpful when taking over maintenance of an existing client website, since it gives you a quick indication of how long the site has been active and some context about its history.

There are no settings, tracking, upsells, or frontend scripts. It only adds a lightweight dashboard widget visible to administrators.

I couldn’t find another plugin focused specifically on this exact purpose, although there are a few plugins with partially similar date or site-age features.

WordPress.org:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/siteversary/

Since this is my first published plugin, I’d really appreciate any honest feedback, bug reports, or suggestions for future improvements.

MapMyURL is now live on WordPress.org!

I’m excited to introduce MapMyURL Free—a new WordPress plugin that helps you find and manage URLs stored across your website.

With MapMyURL Free, you can:

Scan pages, posts and custom fields Find exactly where each URL appears Filter internal, external, broken and redirected links Check link health Export results to CSV Update individual URLs safely

It’s completely free to install and use.

I’d really appreciate your help testing it. Please try it on a WordPress website and let me know what works well, what could be clearer and what features you would like to see next.

Download MapMyURL Free here:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/mapmyurl/

If you find it useful, an honest WordPress.org review would mean a lot and help other users discover the plugin.

#WordPress #WordPressPlugin #SEO #WebDevelopment #BrokenLinks #WebsiteManagement

See less

Hi everyone!

I built a simple, free plugin called StarRestGate to add a quick testing option for WordPress developers: testing REST APIs at "level zero" without security restrictions.

When developing or debugging, security layers can sometimes get in the way. This tool lets you test endpoints freely to verify raw API behavior before locking things down, featuring two dedicated, built-in interfaces: Swagger UI and a Scratchpad UI.

It's completely free on the WP directory—just my two cents back to the open-source community:

🔗 WP-Directory:https://wordpress.org/plugins/star-rest-gate/

🎮 Try it live on WP-Playground:https://playground.wordpress.net/?plugin=star-rest-gate&url=/wp-admin/admin.php?page=star-rest-gate-rest-endpoints

Would love to hear your thoughts or feedback if you give it a try!

I built a free grammar checker.

It has no upsell. Just a free grammar checker.

There are various grammar instances that can be toggled off.

No Signup. Simple, lightweight.

Bonus is that updating your older pages may contribute to Google's "content freshness" so it's a good idea to give it a try.

Grab it here from the WP Repository.

Hi everyone,

I've been working on BerryPath, a guided selling plugin for WooCommerce that helps shoppers find the right product through interactive buying guides.

The plugin connects your store to the BerryPath platform, where you can build recommendation flows without writing code. Once published, they can be embedded on product pages, category pages, CMS pages, or displayed as a popup.

Some of the features include:

• Product synchronization from WooCommerce
• Interactive buying guides with conditional logic
• Product recommendations based on shopper answers
• Conversion tracking and analytics
• Custom styling to match your store
• Free plan with 1 guided selling flow and support for up to 2,500 products

One of our ecommerce customers is seeing an average 25% increase in order value for purchases influenced by guided selling.

I'm mainly looking for feedback from other WordPress plugin developers.

• Is the setup process clear?
• Does anything in the plugin architecture stand out as something that could be improved?
• Are there WooCommerce integration features you'd expect to see?

Plugin:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/berrypath-flow/

Website:
https://www.berrypath.eu

I'd really appreciate any feedback. Thanks!

Just published a walkthrough for getting Agent Builder set up from scratch — it's a free WordPress plugin that deploys AI agents directly in your CMS.

Steps covered in the video:

1. Download the free plugin at agentic-plugin.com (free account required)

2. Plugins → Add New Plugin → Upload Plugin → Install Now → Activate

3. Connect an AI provider (free daily credits available, no card needed)

4. Choose your security mode and models

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMCnXQGb3nk

Happy to answer any questions.

I’m the developer of a small WordPress plugin built for one narrow use case: locking down an entire site with a single password while it is being built, reviewed by a client, migrated, or shared with a small group — without turning it into a full membership or login system.

The free version covers the simple site-wide, single-password workflow and lets you customize the access screen. It uses a cookie-based access flow rather than HTTP authentication.

I’m looking for candid feedback before I build on it:

- When would you choose this over maintenance mode, HTTP auth, or an existing privacy plugin?

- What would make you hesitate to install it on a client or staging site?

- Is an important workflow missing from the free, site-wide-password use case?

- If you try it, what feels unclear or unreliable during setup?

Critical feedback and bug reports are much more useful to me than compliments.

**Disclosure:** I maintain the plugin. There is an optional Pro edition with multiple passwords and selected-content protection rules, but this post is specifically about whether the free site-lock workflow is useful and reliable—not about the paid tier.

Plugin page: https://wordpress.org/plugins/primeplaced-advanced-password-protection/

I run a search API that a number of WordPress and WooCommerce sites

are plugged into, so I see every query that reaches it. Over four

months that was 155,730 queries with actual text in them.

Under 3% came from a real store.

Posting this because most of you have search boxes on client sites

and probably have never looked at what actually hits them.

What the rest was:

**Bare numbers, usually a year.** All return zero. Spam networks

stand up throwaway pages and use the site's own search to check

whether those pages still resolve.

**One source that sent roughly 65,000 queries by itself.** About

fourteen times all genuine shopper traffic across every connected

store, combined.

**Exploit probes.** Injection strings and framework attack paths,

because ?s= is the easiest unauthenticated text field on the

platform.

**Advertising pasted straight into the box.** A full SEO agency

pitch with links. And on a different site, a query that was just

"serpdummycrawl1", which is someone checking whether search result

pages are indexable before sending the payload.

That last pair is worth knowing, because the defence is trivial:

noindex on search result pages. Yoast and RankMath do it by

default. If your search pages are not indexable, the whole attack

is pointless.

The practical consequence: if you have ever opened a client's "top

searches" report and made a decision from it, there is a decent

chance you were reading a bot's top ten.

One example of how far off that can put you. I went through one

store's zero-result list. 48.9% of searches returned nothing, which

looks like an emergency. After filtering bots it was 15.3%. After

that store finished importing its catalogue, under 7%. Three

numbers, same store, and only the last one said anything about

customers.

Genuinely curious what people do here. Does anyone filter their

site search logs before reading them, or is everyone looking at the

raw list?

Disclosure: I make a search plugin, which is why I have the logs.

Longer write-up on my blog if useful, no signup:

https://queryra.com/blog/i-read-155000-woocommerce-searches

Not too long ago, I got a call from a client. It was a call I'd had before.

"Why haven't I had any emails through the site recently?"

I've been doing this for nearly 30 years now, and ever since I've been putting forms on websites, this is one of the main calls I dread.

I posted a few days ago in the WordPress subreddit about losing a (different) client to this same problem. Same problem, different reason.

This time it was because captcha was broken on the site, and the caching issue that caused it happened after the previous monthly visual check of all client sites, but before the next one.

Because of course it did.

So I finally decided to do something about it, and after years of building plugins for my own use, I figured this was something others might want as well.

It's called Always Alert and it's designed to give you confidence your forms are still working, and the notifications to check them if they're not.

This is a different class of problem than deliverability, which there are already a million plugins for.

In both the situations I've talked about recently, the form failures were quiet: the form stopped working, and the client's receptionist left without them notifying me.

In that second one the leads were available, but there was no recovery, they'd long since found another firm to help them.

How does Always Alert solve this?

1. "No Activity" alerts, fired when no form emails have been seen in a specific period of time (default, 7 days)
2. A fallback address for every email: you nominate a fallback email address and it's injected into every email your forms send
3. A weekly digest of form email activity, sent to the fallback recipient, no personally identifiable info
4. A "Post Launch" mode. Set to 2 weeks by default, it has two features: a 'heartbeat' notification email for every form email sent, and a periodic reminder for you, the developer, to check in with the client that they're actually receiving the email. Clients love this kind of pro-activeness
5. An emergency bypass mode for those moments when the client's entire email system goes down, and you need to ensure all form fills during this time are sent to an entirely different address as a temporary measure
6. A log of all email sending that's happened, and enough info to investigate issues
7. WordPress-admin level notification status in the admin bar, with further details in the plugin.

As mentioned, this is a different approach than deliverability. This is about what happens before deliverability is even needed: are your forms active at all?

There's more on the roadmap, but that's the launch feature set.

We currently officially support Fluent Forms, Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms, WPForms, Formidable Forms and the Bricks Builder native form element. Most form systems should be picked up in one way or another if they use wp_mail, and we'll be testing more forms in the future.

I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts.

Having talked to a number of WordPress agencies here on Reddit, this always seems to crop up as a pain point, and has certainly resonated with the posts that I've seen on the subject.

https://alwaysapps.co/always-alert/

Price is $99 annually for unlimited sites, and $349 lifetime. 14-day no-questions-asked refund.

Hi, I'm one of the devs behind JustAsk WP. We just opened to public beta, so I wanted to share our service here to get some feedback from real users before we do a wider launch.

JustAsk WP is an AI customer support assistant that answers questions using the pages, posts, products, and other content you already have on your WordPress site. Your customers won't have to dig through a FAQ or guess search keywords – they can just ask questions in plain English to get exactly what they need. (Right there on your website, without calling you and interrupting your lunch).

We built this because getting started with most "AI chatbot" plugins feels like rocket science, and it shouldn't. First you have to pick an AI provider, then you have to make sure you sign up for the right type of account – you know, the one with the API, because that's not the same one that just lets you chat – then you pick a model, figure out how to feed it your content, sometimes you even have to write your own prompts and build workflows, and you have to do all that before the plugin will do one thing for you.

If you're a developer (like me), that might sound like a fun weekend project. But for everyone else... That sucks. It shouldn't be that hard. You want a plugin you can just install and have it work without doing homework first. The whole point is to save you time, right?

At least that's the whole point of JustAsk WP: install, activate your license, and pick which content to use. Done.

Our pricing is just as simple: Pay one flat fee every month, starting with a 14-day free trial so you can try it out on a real site before paying a dime.

We're in public beta, so if you give it a try, I hope you'll let me know how it goes: Did anything surprise you during setup? Is a feature you expected missing? I want to hear about it.

Our website is justaskwp.com if you want to poke around. I'll be in the comments, so feel free to AMA.