I'm looking for a way to allow visitors to view one post for free, and subsequent posts triggering a content wall requiring account registration.
All of the membership plugins I've found seem to want you to manually set which posts are public and which are gated, but I want whatever the first article someone visits to be free regardless, and then they need to make an account to view the rest.
Does this exist?
I know a lot of people don't really enjoy starting pages in Gutenberg, or the Site Editor itself, so I built a browser-based WordPress playground where ChatGPT, Codex, or another MCP agent can help you put together your first Gutenberg draft. The idea actually came from the browser-based Plugin Check setup I saw while getting my plugins approved on WordPress.org - I thought it was a really neat way to run WordPress and started wondering what else you could do with it.
Agent Composer - a completely free WordPress plugin - sits between the agent and WordPress. It takes requests from the agent and turns them into native Gutenberg markup, but only using the actions, structures, and rules the site owner allows in the settings, so the AI isn't roaming around WordPress with admin access. Composer keeps the editing controlled and predictable, validates the result, and only creates drafts - only humans can publish.
The playground is here: https://preview.wpsuite.io/
Hey r/WordPressPlugins — dev here, launching today after about a month of building. Disclosure up front: this is my plugin.
The problem (you all know it): wp-cron piggybacks on page requests. The request that trips a due event pays for the spawn — and depending on hosting and what's queued, sometimes for the work itself. Add WooCommerce and Action Scheduler and the unlucky visitor is occasionally the one trying to check out.
The caveat before the pitch: if you already run DISABLE_WP_CRON with a real system crontab, the core problem is solved and you don't need the engine half of this plugin. My homepage says the same thing. What it still adds in that setup: it detects the silent failure where the constant is set but the crontab never materialized — no error anywhere, scheduled posts and order emails just quietly stop. It watches for actual external hits to wp-cron.php instead of trusting configuration, and raises it in Site Health with the exact fix.
What the engine does: non-blocking loopback spawns behind a proper concurrency lock (timestamped claim row, shutdown-handler recovery so a fataled worker can't wedge the queue), priority lanes so housekeeping can't starve urgent hooks, a hard "no background work" gate on WooCommerce checkout requests, and Action Scheduler queue visibility without ever running DELETEs against another plugin's tables.
The part you might actually enjoy: I built a benchmark harness before launch — two identical containers, constant-arrival-rate load, cron execution-window tagging, TTFB percentiles. The first valid run showed my plugin made during-cron tail latency worse than stock WordPress — roughly 1s p95 against ~60ms. The "fire and forget" dispatch was quietly blocking the calling request for a full second, while telemetry cheerfully logged every spawn as non-blocking. Fixed it, re-measured: the request that triggers scheduled work went 820ms → 8ms (median), and the slowest 1% during background work went 835ms → 62ms. Typical requests are ~1ms slower — that's the real cost of the due-checks, and I'd rather tell you than have you find it in a profiler.
Raw per-request data, the harness, and the methodology are published here, including the scenarios where the plugin doesn't help: https://getswiftqueue.com/benchmarks
Model: the core engine is free and GPL — the whole engine, not a trial. It's currently awaiting WordPress.org review; until that lands the free build is a direct download on the site. Pro ($49/yr, single site) adds the priority lanes, checkout gating, task run/defer/cancel controls, alerts, and multisite.
Try it without installing anything: there's a WordPress Playground sandbox that boots in your browser tab, and a live demo streaming real spawn telemetry with measured latencies: https://getswiftqueue.com/demo
Would genuinely value technical criticism, especially of the benchmark methodology — that page exists to be argued with. If you spot a hole in how I'm measuring, I'll fix the harness and republish.
I'm the person behind this plugin, so quick heads up that it's my own plugin.
Food Menu is a restaurant menu and online ordering plugin by RadiusTheme. The reason I think it's worth a look over the usual menu plugins is that it doesn't stop at "display a menu", it goes all the way to running the actual restaurant, and you only turn on the parts you need.
Main features:
The free version is honestly enough to launch with, it also includes table reservations, tips, discounts and an offer popup.
Here's the free version: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tlp-food-menu/
Happy to answer anything about the architecture or the WooCommerce side. And I'm after honest feedback, if you build sites for restaurants, what's the feature that usually makes or breaks the plugin for you?
#foodmenu #restaurantmenu
I've been working on WordPress plugins for years, and recently decided to rebuild a PWA plugin from the ground up rather than keep adding to an old codebase.
The interesting part has been dealing with the real-world stuff:
I've recently added push notifications for Android, desktop, and iOS, and I'm still improving the project based on real-world testing.
The project is Hyper PWA.
I'd love to hear from other WordPress developers:
What has been the biggest problem you've faced when implementing or maintaining a PWA on WordPress?
I'm especially interested in feedback about things that existing PWA plugins don't handle well.
Full disclosure: I'm the developer behind Hyper PWA. I'm sharing it here because I'd genuinely like technical feedback and ideas for improving it.
If you're building a hotel, resort, guesthouse, B&B, or vacation rental website with WordPress, here's a plugin we've been working on that might be useful: Easy Hotel Booking.
The main goal is to let hotel owners manage bookings directly from their WordPress website instead of depending completely on third-party booking platforms.
🏨 Room & Accommodation Management
You can create and manage different room types from the WordPress dashboard, including room details, capacity, pricing, amenities, images, and availability.
📅 Availability Calendar
Guests can check available dates before making a reservation. The calendar helps prevent customers from trying to book rooms that are already unavailable.
🛏️ Multi-Room Booking
Guests aren't limited to booking just one room. They can select multiple rooms in a single booking, which can be useful for families, groups, or corporate travelers.
💰 Flexible Pricing
You can set different prices depending on the season or specific days. This makes it easier to handle peak-season pricing, weekend rates, holidays, and other pricing variations.
👨👩👧 Guest & Capacity Pricing
You can define adult and child capacity and configure pricing based on the number of guests when needed.
🍳 Extra Services
Hotels often offer additional services such as breakfast, airport transfers, spa services, extra beds, etc. These can be added to the booking so guests can select them while making their reservation.
💳 WooCommerce Payment Integration
The plugin works with WooCommerce, which means you can take advantage of WooCommerce's payment ecosystem instead of building a separate payment system from scratch.
Depending on the WooCommerce setup, you can offer options such as Stripe, PayPal, bank transfer and other available payment gateways.
💵 Full Payment, Deposit & Pay Later
Hotel owners can choose how they want to collect payments. You can require full payment, collect a deposit, or allow customers to pay later depending on your booking setup.
🔄 iCal Synchronization
If you also list your properties on platforms such as Airbnb or Booking.com, iCal synchronization can help keep availability calendars synchronized across platforms and reduce the possibility of double bookings.
📧 Booking Notifications
Customers and administrators can receive email notifications related to bookings, helping both sides keep track of reservations and booking status.
📱 Responsive Booking Experience
The booking interface is designed to work across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices, which is especially important because many travelers search and book from their phones.
We're continuing to improve the plugin and would genuinely like to hear from people who manage hotel, resort, or vacation-rental websites.
Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-hotel/
If you already use a WordPress hotel booking solution, what feature do you think is most important that many booking plugins still get wrong?
I've been a freelance dev and SEO guy since 2016, and on almost every client site I kept running into the same wall: the SEO essentials I needed (proper schema, redirects, decent audit tools) were locked behind Yoast Premium or Rank Math Pro. So I built my own and put the whole thing out free under GPLv2.
It's called Smart SEO Booster. Full disclosure — I'm the developer, this is my plugin, and I'm posting because I want real feedback, not just installs.
What it does:
14 JSON-LD schema types, output automatically
XML sitemaps (posts, pages, CPTs, images)
Automated titles/meta with template variables + per-post control
Open Graph / Twitter cards with live preview
Breadcrumbs, redirects + 404 logging
AI/GEO SEO — llms.txt output + AI-crawler opt-out, for the AI Overviews / ChatGPT / Perplexity era
WooCommerce + Local SEO, GA4 + Clarity
1-click migration from Yoast or Rank Math (imports your titles/meta/settings)
Everything's included — no premium tier, no "unlock this feature" nags. It's genuinely free.
I know I'm going up against plugins with millions of installs, so I'm not pretending to replace them for everyone. I focused on the stuff heavier plugins do poorly: staying lightweight, and not gating basics behind a subscription.
It's on the WordPress.org directory and there's a short demo video if you want to see it before installing. Honestly the most useful thing for me right now would be blunt feedback — what's missing, what breaks, what you'd never switch for. Happy to answer anything in the comments.
[WordPress.org link] /plugins/smart-seo-booster/advanced/· [demo video link]
First time creating a WordPress site. I am a florist, and I need to create a place where customers can enter an address that they want their flower arrangement delivered to. I also want it to tell them how much it will cost to deliver to the address they entered. I want custom tiers: for example, 1-5 miles from my business would cost $3, 5-10 miles would be $8, 10-15 miles would be $14, 15-20 miles would be $21, and so on. Does it need to be a distance-based shipping rate plugin, or could it be done on a form plugin? TIA!
I've been building this for a while mostly because of a problem I kept running into myself.
I wanted to use agents like Codex/Claude on real WordPress projects, especially Elementor, but I wasn't very comfortable with the usual approach of giving the agent write access and then basically hoping the result was correct.
So I built Stonewright.
It's an open-source WordPress MCP that can work with Elementor, Gutenberg, WooCommerce, ACF, media, content, WP-CLI and Figma-to-Elementor workflows.
The part I care about more than the number of tools is what happens around a write: snapshots/backups, validation, readback, audit evidence and rollback paths where possible.
Elementor ended up becoming a pretty big part of it because that's where I personally ran into the most issues. It supports live widget/control schemas, batch mutations, responsive settings, V3/V4 and post-write verification.
Current public beta has 361 Plugin abilities and 101 Direct tools, but it doesn't throw all of those into the model context at once. The available surface is reduced depending on the task.
I'd genuinely appreciate people trying to break it on staging/test sites. If you find something dumb, please open an issue. That's probably more useful to me right now than people telling me it looks good :)
Also happy to answer any questions you may have.
Give it a try, it's completely free and open source:
What's the best way to manage and translate a multilingual WordPress site? What are the best free plugins or alternative available?
Howdy!
So on one of the sites I run a lot of commenters add links and I couldn't find a decent plugin to render them so I wrote my own:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/vern-comment-embeds/
The GitHub repo is here:
https://github.com/clubside/vern-comment-embeds
And the basic information is:
Easy Comment Embeds improves comment readability by automatically enhancing standalone URLs:
Responsive oEmbed video
Inline image embeds
Twitter/X blockquote fallback
OpenGraph link preview cards
Smart URL detection (standalone URLs only)
Basically just like here on Reddit you put in a URL on its own line in a comment and it is run through WordPress' native oEmbed first and failing that there are fallbacks for images, X/Twitter and standard web pages where I try to build a Facebook-style OpenGraph card.
Hope some others find a use for it, and I'm bothering you all because of WordPress.org's search being so lousy 😜
Chris
Guys I'm trying to learn how can I be a pro in wordpress site cleanup such as malware removal, site optimization, speed up and revamp site.Please suggest me some pro tweaks and techniques.I will always be grateful.
Here is the X link - https://x.com/SybreWaaijer/status/2086528919394480389
Been building WordPress plugins for a while and kept running into the same problem: feature requests scattered everywhere, support threads, refund emails, DMs, 1-star reviews. No way to count them, rank them, or know what actually mattered.
The existing tools (Canny, Frill, Featurebase) work fine, but they're external. You drop a link in your plugin and hope users click it. Most don't, they're already in wp-admin, they don't want to leave.
So I built WPFeatureLoop, a feature-voting board that renders natively inside wp-admin. Two lines of PHP via Composer and the board is live inside your plugin, looking like it belongs there.
A few things I prioritized:
Free plan available. Would love feedback from other plugin devs, especially if you've tried other solutions and hit walls.
Hey everyone,
I'm looking for some marketing advice from anyone who has successfully launched a B2B WordPress/WooCommerce plugin.
I've built a freemium tool that helps e-commerce store owners automate customer bookings and lead generation using LLM APIs. The core free version runs on free-tier APIs so it's a zero-cost tool for small businesses, while the upsell is a one-time lifetime license.
Since the target audience is busy e-commerce store owners, standard organic posting isn't cutting it.
For those who have scaled a WordPress plugin:
Appreciate any insights or feedback!
A simple question: "Why is my plugin not first in the result, when I search for it's exact name?" lead to a series of interesting discoveries about the free plugins directory.
Which is worth it?
I need:
- A way for the client to book on the website
- sync with the booking.com calendar so if a date is booked via website it will appear booked on booking.com
- maybe deposit or full payments via credit/debit cards & PayPal
- a way for the hotel/motel manager to accept/reject bookings via something else other than wp panel ( ive heard they have an app called "Hotel Booking")
- email confirmation for the manager and the client
- in the future I might be doing a motel website so there will be multiple rooms to take care of.
I’ve been building WordPress sites for a long time, and one thing that has always bothered me is how little protection there is when editing CSS directly inside WordPress.
You can be working in Additional CSS or the theme editor, miss a closing brace, accidentally paste something malformed, wipe out a chunk of code, or make some other seemingly tiny mistake…
…and WordPress will quite happily let you save it.
Sometimes the result is minor. Sometimes half the layout goes sideways... and if you’re editing a live site, that’s a pretty unpleasant moment.
Obviously experienced developers have backups, version control, staging environments, etc. But in the real world, people still make quick CSS changes in production. Clients do it. Freelancers do it. I’ve done it. And WordPress itself doesn’t really give you much of a safety net at the moment you hit Save.
That got me wondering why there couldn’t be something sitting between the editor and the save action that essentially says:
“Hang on, this looks dangerous. Are you sure you want to save this?”
So I ended up building a plugin around that idea.
It scans CSS before it gets saved and looks for errors or patterns that are likely to cause serious problems. The really nasty stuff gets blocked, while less serious issues can just generate a warning.
I also added backup history and the ability to rollback because I figured detecting a problem is only half the battle. If somebody already screwed something up, getting back to the previous working version should be simple.
The plugin eventually became CSS Guardrail.
A few things I’m especially curious about:
I have video demos of the plugin over at cssguardrail.com if anyone is curious to take a peek.
Full disclosure: my plugin (Queryra, AI semantic search for WooCommerce).
Small milestone I wanted to share somewhere it's allowed: searching "semantic search" in the plugin directory now returns my plugin first — ahead of search plugins that have been around for a decade and are many times its size.
To be clear about what this is and is not: it's an algorithmic search ranking, not an endorsement. WordPress.org does not recommend plugins, and rankings move — I screenshotted mine for the day it does.
Happy to answer questions about building a plugin solo, honest zeroes in search results, or anything else. And if you want to check the claim: search "semantic search" at wordpress.org/plugins.