Hi everyone! I’ve been working on MailSentra, a WordPress plugin for logging and troubleshooting emails sent through wp_mail().

It gives you a searchable email log with delivery-attempt status and error details, plus dashboard charts and reports to help you spot patterns. There’s also a Tools page where you can send a test email and review available mailer diagnostics if something goes wrong.

MailSentra includes settings for controlling what gets logged, such as message bodies, headers, attachments, IP addresses, and log retention, so you can choose what makes sense for your site.

It’s intended to help you understand what WordPress reports about an email attempt; a “sent” status doesn’t guarantee inbox delivery. It also isn’t an SMTP service, so you’ll still need your existing mail setup.

You can check it out on WordPress.org. I’d appreciate feedback, especially on what would make it more useful for your workflow.

I got tired of security plugins asking me to trust them, so I built one that shows its work.

One thing that always bothered me about WordPress security plugins is that you can enable a dozen security features, see a bunch of green checkmarks, and still have no clear idea what’s actually protecting your site.

So I decided to build something different: SecureLite Security.

The main feature is Attack Simulation. It runs 13 harmless security tests against your own WordPress site and shows you what happened:

• Was the attack blocked by the plugin?
• Did your hosting provider's firewall stop it?
• Or did nothing stop it?

It tests things like SQL injection, XSS, path traversal, brute-force logins, user enumeration, PHP execution in uploads, and XML-RPC abuse.

If a test fails, it tells you what to fix. You can then rerun that specific test instead of repeating the entire scan.

Something else influenced how I built it.

Before writing the code, we went through 1,080 negative reviews of major WordPress security plugins. Interestingly, only 3.4% of those reviews mentioned failure to stop an attack. More common complaints involved people getting locked out of their own sites (12.7%) or their sites going down (11.3%).

That made me think: security shouldn't come at the cost of losing access to your own website.

So I designed SecureLite's lockout system to avoid locking out the real admin, with a documented recovery process if something goes wrong.

It also includes a firewall, login protection, hidden login URL, 2FA with recovery codes, WordPress core integrity checks, and a malware scanner.

It's free, doesn't require an account, and doesn't nag you to upgrade.

I'm still improving it, and I'd genuinely like feedback from people who manage WordPress sites.

If you tried it on your own site, what would you want a security plugin like this to prove to you? And if you're running LiteSpeed or shared hosting, I'd especially appreciate hearing how it behaves in your environment.

Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/securelite-security/

Once upon a time...

OK, about a year ago.

I needed to keep track of all the things I had to do to renovate an old house in the mountains.

So I made a spreadsheet.

Nothing fancy. Just a list of things I needed to do, projects I was working on, and a way to keep track of what I'd finished.

It worked. Kinda.

But I kept finding things I wanted it to do that spreadsheets aren't particularly good at.

So I did what any reasonably experienced developer with questionable self-restraint would do.

I built a quick MySQL database.

Now I could track tasks, mark things complete, and keep everything organized without fighting the spreadsheet.

That sorta worked pretty well, too.

Until I thought, "You know, it would be nice to access this from my laptop."

I do a lot of WordPress/PHP development, so the obvious answer was to put a web interface on it and run it under WordPress.

Problem solved.

Well, not exactly.

Because once it was running under WordPress, I thought, "Why not make it a plugin?"

And once it was a plugin, I started adding things.

Projects. Tasks. Notes. Priorities. Different ways to look at what needed doing. A dashboard. Kanban boards. Status reports. Import and export tools. Did I mention questionable self-restraint?

You know how it goes. One little improvement leads to another, and pretty soon your simple weekend project has developed a personality of its own.

And somewhere along the way, my little spreadsheet became an actual project planner.

The funny part is that I never really set out to build a project management product. I just wanted a better way to keep track of everything I was doing.

I still use it every day.

It's where I keep my projects, remind myself what I need to do next, and leave notes for myself so I don't have to remember what I was thinking three days ago.

And it turns out that keeping track of a house renovation isn't all that different from keeping track of software projects, or any other collection of things that need to get done. So I use it in my day job.

Eventually, I decided that if it was useful to me, maybe someone else could get some use out of it, too.

So I started the process of getting it into the official WordPress Plugin Directory.

That turned into an education of its own.

Code reviews. Security checks. Sanitization. Escaping. WordPress coding standards. More testing. More debugging. And, of course, a name change to satisfy the directory requirements.

After a year of tinkering, building, breaking, fixing, and learning, Undergroundact Project Planner is now available on WordPress.org.

It's free.

No elaborate sales pitch. No "contact us for pricing." I built something I find useful, and I'd like to share it.

Here's the plugin:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/undergroundact-project-planner/

I'm still working on it, and I suspect I always will be. That's half the fun.

If you use WordPress and need a way to organize projects and tasks, give it a try.

And if you find something broken, confusing, or think of something it ought to do, I'd genuinely like to hear about it.

I'm particularly interested in how other people organize their projects, because what started as a tool for one person has the potential to become something useful to a lot of people.

Anyway, that's how a spreadsheet for renovating an old house in the mountains turned into a WordPress plugin.

And no, the house isn't finished yet.

Been going through a few client sites that need to get closer to WCAG 2.2 before the EAA rules kick in harder next year, and the usual issues keep coming up, low contrast, hard-to-read text sizes, and almost no keyboard navigation. Most of the owners aren’t technical, so anything that needs custom code or a big setup is a non-starter. I ended up testing one on a couple of smaller WordPress sites and it was basically install, activate, and the toolbar was live in under a minute with the contrast, font size, and reading aids already available. The multilingual piece and the built-in accessibility statement generator were useful too since a few of the sites serve mixed audiences.

It’s been stable so far and didn’t add any noticeable load. How are you handling the readability and keyboard navigation pieces on client sites without turning it into a long project? And has anyone found a lightweight option that clients can actually manage themselves after the initial setup?

This tool is not based on any external service and does not share your data with third parties.

This premium extension is available exclusively at https://woocommerce.com/products/sales-analysis-for-woocommerce/

I've been comparing Wordfence with WebKernelAI Security to understand the practical differences between locally executed WordPress security and a cloud-connected approach.

Both address website security, but they take different architectural approaches.

1. Local scanning vs. cloud-assisted analysis

Wordfence performs firewall and malware-scanning operations within the WordPress hosting environment.

WebKernelAI Security uses a cloud-connected architecture designed to offload intensive security analysis while keeping a lightweight integration on the WordPress site.

The trade-off is that local scanning has direct access to files, while cloud-assisted analysis depends on secure communication and the data available to the remote service.

1. Firewall enforcement

Wordfence provides an on-site WordPress firewall.

WebKernelAI's architecture includes cloud and edge security capabilities, but the actual protection depends on where rules are enforced and how traffic reaches those controls. External detection alone isn't equivalent to blocking an attack before it reaches WordPress.

1. Communication security

WebKernelAI Security documents HMAC-SHA256 authentication, Ed25519 signatures and nonce-based replay protection for supported communication workflows.

These controls can help protect remote requests and commands, provided signature verification, key management and replay checks are implemented correctly.

1. Website management

WebKernelAI combines security monitoring and supported WordPress management operations with technical SEO workflows, including crawling, canonical configuration and sitemap-related capabilities.

Wordfence focuses primarily on WordPress security and also offers centralized site management through Wordfence Central.

1. Performance and operational trade-offs

Cloud-assisted scanning may reduce the computational work performed on the origin server, but the plugin still needs resources for event handling, inventory collection and communication.

I'd be interested in actual benchmarks comparing CPU usage, memory, database writes, detection accuracy and alert latency under the same hosting conditions.

A few questions for people managing WordPress sites

- Would you use cloud-assisted security analysis alongside an on-site firewall?

- Which operations should never be delegated to a remote security service?

- What evidence would you require before trusting remote file-management commands?

- For agencies managing multiple sites, is combining security monitoring and technical SEO genuinely useful?

I'm interested in practical experience and technical criticism of both approaches, particularly around security boundaries, performance and reliability.

is there any good AI plugin which will find interesting post for blog and post automatically (with approval)

Plugin renewals hit at random times through the year, so it's easy to never see the total. We built a page that adds it all up.

https://topsyde.com/plugin-cost-calculator

You tick what your site uses (SEO, caching, security, cookie banner, spam, backups, page builder, forms, etc), pick which plugin you use for each, and it totals the yearly price from each vendor's own pricing page. Every price links to where we got it and the date we checked it. If you pay something different just type over it. You can set how many sites you run, and the result saves in the link so you can send it to a client or whoever. No signup, no email.

The usual eight (Yoast SEO Premium, WP Rocket, Wordfence Premium, CookieYes Pro, Akismet Pro and WP-Optimize Premium, plus the free Redirection and Broken Link Checker) come out to about $746 a year for one site at list price. A bunch of those have free versions, so think of it as what the paid plans cost.

Full disclosure, we're a managed WordPress host and the page shows $0 next to the plugins our plans include. If any price is off let us know and we'll fix it.

Hi all. I built this because recurring events are one of the main reasons people pay for The Events Calendar’s $259/year plan, and many small sites (clubs, classes, churches) only need “every Tuesday”.

What it does:

Daily and weekly rules with exception dates, free

Each date is a normal TEC event, so nothing breaks if you remove the add-on

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bazingaworld-recurring-events-calendar/

It’s new (released this week), so feedback and bug reports are very welcome. I’m the author, not affiliated with The Events Calendar.

Hey /r/WordpressPlugins,

A couple of weeks ago I shared SlimPress here, and the feedback from this community was awesome. Today I’m back with another tool I built out of my own day-to-day frustration: Cron Monitor.

Every time a scheduled post missed its publish window, a backup silently failed, or a site slowed down because of background tasks, I ran into the same wall. Existing cron plugins are great at showing you what is scheduled to run, but unless you pay for a Pro tier or an external SaaS, you're mostly flying blind on what actually happened when the job executed.

I wanted full execution visibility without paywalls, so I built it myself. Just like my last plugin, it is 100% free. There is no pro tier, no locked features, no nag banners, and zero telemetry.

What it covers

• Execution History & Timing: See exactly when jobs ran, how long they took, and any recorded errors—including fatal crashes and timeouts.
• Instant Failure Alerts: Get notified via Email, Slack, or Discord when a background job crashes, runs late, or stops running altogether.
• Plugin & Theme Ownership: Automatically maps cryptic cron hooks back to the specific plugin or theme that owns them by inspecting their observed callbacks.
• Orphan & Duplicate Cleanup: Identifies duplicate events and leftover cron jobs from long-deleted plugins based on what actually happens when they run, with a safe preview before you remove anything.
• Full Job Management: Add, edit, run on-demand, pause, resume, or bulk-delete events and custom schedules straight from the admin.
• Cron Health & WooCommerce Support: Tracks cron jobs that are progressively getting slower, flags server config issues blocking wp-cron.php, and automatically logs failed Action Scheduler tasks (huge for debugging WooCommerce).
• Developer Tools: Includes native WP-CLI commands, CSV exports, and a REST API for connecting your own external monitoring tools.

How it behaves on your site

• Zero bloat or phoning home: All logs stay strictly inside your local WordPress database. The only outbound requests are the optional failure alerts if you explicitly configure an email address or Slack/Discord webhook.
• Works out of the box: Once activated, just head to Tools → Cron Monitor. Duplicate detection, ownership mapping, and health checks work immediately, and your execution history starts building as your background jobs run.
  

Quick transparency note on AI: All the core logic and architecture were written by hand - AI was only used to help with UI mockups, class scaffolding/boilerplate, testing, documentation, and a final code review pass.

👉 Cron Monitor on WordPress.org

I’d love to get some feedback from others maintaining WordPress sites—especially if there are specific edge cases, WP-CLI flags, or webhook payloads that would make debugging background tasks easier for your workflow!

I built this because the internal-linking plugins I tried couldn't handle inflected languages (Polish has up to seven forms of one word) and showed spreadsheets where I needed a map. It just passed the WordPress.org review.

What the free version does:

- Braid Map: your whole site as a live graph. Node size = internal PageRank, topic clusters render as islands, orphan pages drift at the rim.

- Reports: orphan pages, anchor problems (generic phrases, raw URLs, bloated anchors), broken links and redirects.

- Rule-based auto-linking ("phrase -> page") that matches inflected forms, while the inserted anchor is always the exact form found in your text.

- Every change has a before/after preview and one-click undo.

Directory page: https://wordpress.org/plugins/linkbraid/

There is a paid version with AI suggestions on your own API key, but nothing in the free version is crippled to push it. Honest feedback welcome, especially from people with bigger content sites. Works with Gutenberg, Classic, Elementor and Divi.

Disclosure: I’m part of the PeepSo team.

We’ve released the latest version of PeepSo, an update to our social-networking and community plugin for WordPress. This release covers moderation, member recognition, activity-stream design, Groups and Pages, and several WordPress integrations.

Some of the main changes:

• AI Moderator in Early Access: An optional beta that can review supported new and edited content through background processing. It requires the Early Access plugin, Reporting, and an OpenAI API key. It does not scan existing content history by default, private messages, uploaded files, or profile, Group, and Page details. OpenAI usage is billed through the site owner’s OpenAI account.

• Expanded Achievements: Leaderboards, birthday and membership-anniversary achievements, a scrolling achievement, and the ability for members to share earned achievements in the activity stream. Achievements requires an active Ultimate Bundle license.

• Redesigned conversations: Clearer comment structure, improved reply indentation, more consistent reaction summaries, better comment counts, and a mobile-friendly Copy Link option.

• Community and design controls: Reusable Block Theme design presets, configurable default images for Groups and Pages, a My Groups block and widget, and more consistent Page identities.

Before updating:

Update PeepSo Core, installed PeepSo add-ons, and the PeepSo theme together. We recommend using your normal backup and staging process.

Sites using custom comment templates or CSS should check them against the new comment structure. Customized Block Theme logos and WooCommerce profile routes should also be verified on staging.

Full release details:

https://peepso.com/latest-release/

We’d especially appreciate feedback from developers and site owners running customized PeepSo communities: which change is most useful to you, and is there anything in the upgrade guidance that needs a clearer explanation?

Most WordPress plugins I use have a free version that meets my needs. I've only paid for a handful.

For the plugins you’ve paid for, what made you decide to upgrade?

• A specific feature you couldn’t find elsewhere
• Reliable support when something breaks
• The ability to use it on multiple sites
• The free version was too limited
• Regular updates and peace of mind
• Something else?

And what makes you hesitate before paying?

For me, renewal prices that jump significantly after the first year are a big turn-off, even if the plugin itself is great.

Hey everyone! I’ve been building Wonderit, a creative hub and community platform tailored for developers, designers, gamers, and WordPress creators.

The platform focuses on sharing custom resources, troubleshooting WordPress and coding challenges, and connecting creators across different niches.

You can check it out here: https://wonderit.us

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the platform layout, or if you're working on any interesting WordPress projects right now, let's discuss below!

Hey Everyone,

WebLinguist is a super simple, easy to setup website translation and localization service. Just install our Wordpress plugin (or drop in a one line script) and you're instantly multilingual. We utilize one small cdn delivered script, and translation files are all stored in the cloud (client side translation), so your site stays fast. WebLinguist automatically handles things like hreflang and x-default tags, SEO metadata, and self-referencing canonicals, and multilingual pages are made available at their own URLs via query params, so they’re indexable by search engines.

After you install it, any new content you add or existing content you edit is automatically picked up and retranslated on the next page load. Use the customization options to adjust the language switcher to your brand design, or you can hide the widget entirely and just use the query params...If you have an ecommerce store you can toggle on our price localization feature which will show users an estimate of the price in their localized currency (rates updated daily).

Right now, each of our plans is only $1 for the first month...try it out for one month with no contract, cancel anytime :)

https://weblinguist.ai/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/growthdynamics-weblinguist/

Hey everyone! I’m the developer behind Seonix, an SEO platform with a WordPress plugin, and wanted to share what I’ve been building.

The plugin includes two free features that work right after activation, without an account:

• Automatically generates /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt from your published content.
• Submits changed URLs through IndexNow when you publish or update content.

With a free Seonix account, you can also view your site’s SEO audit inside WordPress, with a health dashboard and page-level issues in the editor.

Optional paid features include AI article generation, scheduled publishing to WordPress, and applying suggested SEO fixes. These work through the connected Seonix platform.

Website: https://seonix.ai
WordPress plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/seonix/

I’d appreciate feedback on the plugin, especially whether the setup is straightforward and the audit results help you understand what to fix next.

Happy to answer questions about how it works!

​

Hey everyone,

I'm running a tour and safari booking website using WordPress and the Traveler theme.

The Problem:

Previously, when a customer selected a tour, chose their dates, and number of guests, then clicked "Check Availability" or "Checkout", a large WhatsApp button would appear on the screen. Clicking it would redirect them directly to our company's WhatsApp with a pre-filled message containing all their selected booking details.

What happens now:

The WhatsApp step is completely gone. Now, when they click checkout, it redirects them to the standard WooCommerce checkout page (asking for billing info, email, payment methods, etc.), which I don't want. I just want the WhatsApp flow back.

What I've checked:

I checked my plugins, and there is no specific "WooCommerce to WhatsApp" plugin installed. I only have "Chaty", which just adds a floating widget, not the booking flow.

I dug into the Traveler Theme Options > Booking Options and WooCommerce Options, but I couldn't find any specific setting to route the checkout to WhatsApp.

I checked the individual tour settings, but changing them to "Instant Booking" or "Enquire Booking" doesn't bring back that specific WhatsApp pop-up with the variables.

Did I accidentally disable a built-in feature in the Traveler theme? Or was this likely a custom code snippet in functions.php that got deleted? How can I restore the flow that sends the checkout variables to WhatsApp?

Any help would be hugely appreciated!

Hey,

I’ve been building WP plugins since 2018. Over the last year or so, I’ve been pushing harder on the product side again—launched two new plugins alongside my original one. But man, getting those first 1,000 installs feels like a battle now.

Honestly, my first plugin was kind of a lucky shot. The timing was spot on and I had solid marketing partners helping out, but that’s definitely not the norm. Marketing "regular" utility plugins takes way more grind than I expected.

I was thinking it could be cool to connect with a few other dev/founders to create a small, tight-knit accountability group. A place to share marketing tests, give honest feedback, help each other out with testing, and pitch new ideas.

Ideally looking for people who’ve been in the dev trench for a bit (maybe 5+ years of dev experience) so everyone’s roughly at the same level and can bring real value to the table.

Right now this is just a random thought, but if anyone’s in a similar boat and interested in setting something up, let me know!

Exciting news for Sidcraft Page Builder https://canvasly.pro users! 🚀

We’ve just upgraded our AI/MCP capability. Now, the AI Chatbot can read any live URL and recreate the layout using native Sidcraft blocks. Whether you're migrating from another page builder or adapting a design you love, it’s easier than ever.

No complicated prompts or scripts needed—just type:

👉 "Read entire website https://example.com and recreate all pages with Sidcraft Page Builder blocks."

Plus, after your pages are created, you can seamlessly convert and save them as static HTML pages from Sidcraft Page Builder > Tools.

How it works:

1. Click Website, enter the address (example.com is fine; it falls back to http:// if HTTPS fails), and tick “I own this website or have permission to copy its design and content”. The import won’t start without that tick.
2. Choose whether to leave out the site’s header and footer, so your theme’s own show instead. You can also choose how pages are rebuilt:
   • converted directly: the same layout, colours, fonts and images, with no AI cost;
   • rebuilt by the AI: cleaner structure, and only available when an AI provider is connected.
3. Pro lists the site’s pages, up to 40: menu links first, then the sitemap. Pages blocked by the site’s robots.txt, plus files, admin, cart and checkout links, are skipped.
4. Pick the pages, then either Create draft pages (up to 20 at a time, each a new builder page with an “open in the builder” link), or Build here to load one page as a preview plan on the page you’re editing.

Hey everyone!

Our new Gutenberg blocks plugin, ShapeBlock, has been approved and published on WordPress.org.

We’re building ShapeBlock as a practical collection of Gutenberg blocks for creating modern WordPress websites without relying heavily on page builders.

The goal is to keep it lightweight, useful, and flexible for things like:

• Landing pages
• Business websites
• Marketing sections
• Blog layouts
• Content-heavy websites
• General Gutenberg-based site building

The free version is fully usable on its own, and we plan to keep expanding it with more blocks, layouts, and design variations over time.

You can check it out here:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/shapeblock/

We’re still at the very early stage, so feedback from WordPress users and developers would be really valuable.

I’d especially love to know:

• How does the block editing experience feel?
• Are the current blocks actually useful for real projects?
• Is anything confusing or difficult to use?
• What Gutenberg blocks would you like us to build next?
• What features are missing that would make you consider using ShapeBlock on client projects?
• How important are ready-made styles/patterns compared to adding more individual blocks?

Constructive criticism is very welcome. We’d rather hear what needs improvement now while the plugin is still young.

Thanks for checking out ShapeBlock!

What if I told you you could quickly fix/remove broken plugins or stuck maintenance screens within 100's of WordPress websites with a simple plugin and a custom browser setting, free (within seconds)?

Would you be curious how?

Disclosure: I’m one of the developers of this plugin. It’s free on WordPress.org, and I’m posting mainly to get feedback from people who actually use CF7.

CF7 is reliable and works with almost everything, but once a form has more than a few fields you end up writing things like this by hand:

<div class="cf-row">
  <div class="cf-col"><label>Name [text* your-name]</label></div>
  <div class="cf-col"><label>Email [email* your-email]</label></div>
</div>
[submit "Send"]

Then you write CSS so the columns actually work, and then you hand-code the email body on the Mail tab and update it every time you add a field.

CompactForm is a drag & drop builder that sits on top of CF7. A few things we cared about:

• Forms stay real CF7 forms. Same shortcode, same submission flow, and your existing CF7 add-ons keep working.
• Opt-in per form. Your existing forms aren’t touched unless you open them in the builder. You can also import existing CF7 markup.
• Conditional logic and validation are re-checked on the server, so disabling JavaScript doesn’t bypass them.
• Mail tab autofill. Generates a responsive HTML email with every field, sets Reply-To to the visitor’s email, and has a live preview.
• Per-field styling (fonts, colors, spacing, responsive width) without custom CSS.
• Built-in fields like star rating, signature, date/time pickers, range slider, and country dropdown, plus honeypot, minimum fill time and reCAPTCHA v3 for spam.
• Assets only load on pages with a form, and you can switch off field types you don’t use.
• Export/import forms as JSON between sites, handy if you build client sites.

What I’d really like to know:

1. What’s your biggest annoyance with building forms in CF7?
2. If you moved away from CF7, what pushed you to switch?
3. Is anything here a dealbreaker or missing for you?

Happy to answer questions, and criticism is genuinely welcome. I’ll put the link in the comments if the mods allow it.