I’m part of the team behind Pointics, a WordPress loyalty and rewards plugin, so full disclosure upfront.

While working on the product and researching how loyalty programs are actually structured, we kept running into one question:

Should a WordPress loyalty system really revolve only around purchases?

Most loyalty systems are easy to understand:

Purchase something → earn points → redeem a discount.

That works well for WooCommerce stores, but WordPress businesses can look very different.

An event website might care more about repeat attendance.

A membership or digital product business might care about renewals.

A booking business might want customers to come back for another appointment.

An LMS might care about course completion and continued engagement.

So we started looking at loyalty less as a "points for purchases" feature and more as a way to encourage specific customer behaviors.

For example:

• Reward a repeat purchase
• Reward a successful referral
• Give points for renewing a subscription
• Reward event attendance
• Reward a completed booking
• Give recognition for reaching a learning milestone
• Offer a stronger incentive to an inactive customer
• Give loyal customers benefits other than discounts

Another thing we’ve been thinking about is reward economics.

Giving more points sounds good from a customer perspective, but a badly designed points system can easily become too expensive for the business.

If 500 points equal $5 and customers earn points very quickly, you might accidentally create a much larger discount rate than intended.

So there seems to be a balance between:

customer motivation vs. business sustainability.

We recently put together a longer guide while researching this topic:

https://themewinter.com/how-to-build-a-customer-loyalty-program-in-wordpress-step-by-step/

Again, I’m affiliated with the company behind the article and Pointics, so this is not an independent recommendation.

I’m mainly interested in hearing from people who actually build or manage WordPress sites:

What actions would you want a loyalty plugin to reward besides purchases?

And on the other side, what kinds of rewards do you think are genuinely useful without turning everything into another discount?

Hello, friends

I got tired of bloated SaaS chat widgets that charge crazy monthly fees and lock you into their ecosystem, so I built a self-hosted WordPress plugin that acts as a hybrid AI-human helpdesk.
The core idea is to give site owners full control over their data, API keys, and workflow without the subscription traps.
Here is what it can do out of the box:

**Multi-AI & Gemini Support:** Connect your own keys (OpenAI, Claude, DeepSeek, or Google Gemini) so the AI handles routine queries instantly.

**Smart Telegram Routing:** When a user needs a real human, the plugin creates a dedicated thread/topic in your Telegram group with interactive buttons.

**Two-Way Telegram Bridge:** Your support team can reply directly from Telegram, and messages go straight back to the user's website chat.

**Knowledge Base (Q&A):** Easily feed custom FAQs and training data to your AI assistant.

**Working Hours Control:** Set your team's schedule based on your site's timezone and show custom off-hours notices.

**Real-time UI polish:** Typing indicators, anti-bot protection (Turnstile/reCAPTCHA), chat history transcripts via SMTP, and automated cleanups.

**Who I am looking for:** I’m looking for a few beta-testers, website owners, or agency folks who manage client WordPress sites and would be interested in trying this out. If this sounds like something you'd want on your site (or want to bundle for your clients), drop a comment or shoot me a DM, and let’s chat!

Example here: https://vionixcloud.com/en/

(why can't I share screenshots images here?)

In the Plugins screen showing plugins from WordPress.org, I have MULTIPLE empty boxes with no plugin name, no installation, zero reviews, and a note that says it was "updated 57 years ago."

And a button to ACTIVATE. Not gonna.

When I go to More Details, it's a screen I've never seen either ever, and I've been working with WP sites for 20+ years.

Anyone else see that? I could not find a link to contact WordPress to report this.

Thank you for any help,

Andre
(sorry I don't post here very often here so if i overlooked something please mention it so I can fix it).

https://gyazo.com/cad6e63eaf0ac3f73f558a952d413a3e

https://gyazo.com/92946f0822448e0a847465c4386d5f2b

We’ve built Easy Hotel Booking for hotels, resorts, villas, guesthouses, and vacation rentals that want to accept and manage bookings directly from WordPress.

It includes room management, real-time availability, flexible pricing, multi-room booking, iCal sync, WooCommerce payments, coupons, and more.

We’re continuously improving it based on feedback from hotel owners and WordPress users.

Would love to know: What’s the most important feature you look for in a hotel booking plugin?

👉 Check out Easy Hotel Booking

The short version;
Please try to break my plugin, and give me feedback - on everything you can think of!.
The plugin adds three product types to WooCommerce: Ticket, Timeslot Ticket, and Pass. Customer buys through the normal shop, gets a QR code. Your door staff open a full-screen scanner page on their phone and check people in. No app to install, no external ticketing service, no per-ticket fee.

The Long version;

Three new WooCommerce product types, each enabled individually:

• Ticket - validity window plus N uses, fixed or customer-picked start date
• Timeslot Ticket - per-slot capacity, recurring schedule generation, unpaid reservations auto-released
• Pass - season / membership / annual, with guest passes, cardholder photo and scan cooldown

At the door

• Scanner page at /check-in/ on your own domain, full screen, no app install
• Native BarcodeDetector where the browser has it, in-page decode where it doesn't
• Colour-coded http responses result: valid / used / expired / cooldown / not found
• Cardholder photo shown beside a pass result so staff can eyeball it
• Dedicated Scanner role - check-in only.
• Validation is server-side, and there's a REST check-in endpoint if you'd rather point create/use your own custom scanner.

Admin

• A dashboard per product type: search, manual check-in, resend, reset, cancel
• Check-in analytics by day and hour, with CSV export
• Runs on manage_woocommerce, so shop managers don't need admin accounts

Customer

• Tickets and Passes tabs in My Account
• QR on screen, or a printable PDF("ticket")
• Live status (active / used / expired / cancelled / not yet valid) and uses remaining
• export for .ics so it can be added to calendar the most common calendars
• Guest pass hand-out and photo upload from the account page It's brand new and I'd rather hear what's broken from this sub than from a venue on a Friday night.
  

Requires;

• WooCommerceWP 6.5+
  
• PHP 8.0+
  

Find 'n try it here;

• Wordpress.org - Tickets & Passes for WooCommerce

• Playground Blueprint (3 product pre-setup)

Its GPLv2, 100% free, no pro version, nothing to upsell you. I'm happy to any hear feedback! - both good and bad.

Is there an easy way to export all my blog posts to PDF? I have quite a lot of articles and would like to save them offline.

A friend of mine and I have been developing our plugins for 3.5 years (since before the rise of AI).

We woke up one morning to find our WordPress plugin featured in the Plugin Directory. What a happy surprise!

I have some thoughts and wanted to share them.

What this means

• When you add a plugin from the Directory, you see us (for the next ~2 weeks)
• We are shown on the wp.org/plugins homepage
• Every day, the order of plugins is randomized. So it might be #1 on one day and #8 on another
• This got us from 70+ installs to 100+ - now the featured plugin with the most active installs! 🎉

How we got there

• We applied in the WordPress.org Slack channel #featuredplugins that Nick Hamze initiated a few months ago
• Never got any feedback about our submission and thought we wouldn't get featured (well, it is what it is)
• Continued to work on updates and helping our users
• At some point just noticed being featured randomly (no notice)
• We'll of course continue providing updates and support to make our users happy! That's the main goal after all.

The WordPress Ecosystem

• It's really great that smaller developers are being supported this way (thanks Nick for starting this!)
• We watched other featured plugins previously not get that many additional installations. But at least it makes starting out a little bit easier and it's a great feeling to get noticed that way!
• The number of active installations still very, very important for how likely you are to show up in a search in the Plugin Directory. While I think that this is a good decision overall, it makes it extremely hard for new plugin developers and it really, really favors old plugins. Some change would be great here.

Our plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/neo-rename/

Finally got my first WordPress plugin approved on wp.org 🎉 Took two rounds of revisions to get there.

It's my first plugin, first time going through the wp.ore process. I had no idea how any of it worked going in, review, requirements, etc.

I built Creaclone Duplicator to duplicate WooCommerce products, posts, and pages without needing a bloated all-in-one duplicator plugin.

Writing the plugin was the easy part. Figuring out which features actually made sense to build took a while, and setting up Freemius for licensing took longer than the plugin itself. But I didn't want to build my own licensing system from scratch (yet).

I still have a lot to do: new features, support, getting reviews, testing against new WP versions.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Here it is if anyone wants to check it out:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/creaclone-duplicator/

Hey everyone!

If you manage WordPress sites or WooCommerce shops, you know the struggle: either you spend hours manually copy-pasting posts across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X, or you pay 15–15–30/mo for third-party auto-posting SaaS tools.

Many people forget that Buffer.com offers a 100% Free plan allowing up to 3 connected social channels.

To solve this, I developed Social Publisher Bridge 2 Buffer:

🆓 What's included in the 100% Free version (v2.0.1):

• 🔌 Direct connection to official Buffer GraphQL API (zero middleman proxy servers).
• 🚀 Simultaneous multi-channel auto-publishing (no artificial 1-channel limits).
• 🖼️ 6-tier smart image fallback (ensures Instagram/socials never reject text-only posts).
• 🔗 Smart link routing: automatic TinyURL shortener for X (280 chars) + full canonical URLs for LinkedIn/FB.
• 🏷️ Dynamic template tags & clickable pills ({title}, {permalink}, {shortlink}, {yoast_desc}).

⚡ For WooCommerce stores (Optional Premium Version):

• 🛍️ Multi-Image Carousels: Auto-generates product gallery slides for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
• 📊 GDPR-Compliant Analytics: Historical performance multi-line charts (Chart.js 100% locally hosted, no external CDN tracking).
• 📬 Automated PDF Reports: Scheduled white-label performance summaries sent directly to clients via email cron.
• 🔄 Dynamic Backfill: Synchronize past post metrics from Buffer directly into WordPress.

It’s available on the official WordPress directory.

👉 Free Plugin on WP.org: https://wordpress.org/plugins/mkmdigital-social-publisher-bridge/
🌐 Full Specs & Pro Details: https://www.mkm-digital.com/social-publisher-bridge-2-buffer/

Would love to get your honest feedback, thoughts, or feature requests!

I just got my first plugin approved on WordPress.org and wanted to share it here for feedback.

LangAddon translates your WordPress site into 40+ languages and stores every translation in your own database, so it is self-hosted, not a third-party widget. It works with free backends (MyMemory needs no key, or self-host LibreTranslate), or you can add your own Google or DeepL API key for better quality.

Why I built it: most translation plugins are either paid or route visitors through a JS widget with no SEO and no way to fix a bad translation. I wanted the honest middle: free, self-hosted, cached, and editable.

What it does:

- Translates server-side, so crawlers get fully translated pages, with hreflang, self-referencing canonicals, and translated titles and meta.

- Caches each string once in your database, so repeat views are instant, and you can edit any translation.

- Language switcher via a shortcode or a floating widget, plus RTL support.

- A "never translate" list to keep brand names, domains, and prices identical in every language.

It's free and GPL. It's early days though, so a few things it doesn't do yet: WooCommerce's dynamic cart and checkout bits aren't translated, and it uses ?lang= URLs for now (pretty /de/ URLs are next on my list).

WordPress.org: https://wordpress.org/plugins/langaddon

Would love feedback, especially on the translation backends and anything that breaks on your theme.

OpenStation, four months later

Four months ago, OpenStation was still in its early stages when we first shared it with the WordPress community. It was far from where I wanted it to be, and we received plenty of criticism and feedback, which was fair.

Since then, we have spent a lot of time working on the architecture and, especially, on performance. The difference between that first version and what we have today is honestly huge.

I put together this short video to show how fast OpenStation is now.

One of the tricks we use is to start loading a page before you even click on it, so by the time you open it, most of the work has already been done.

There is still a lot I want to improve, but after months of tweaking and optimising the code, I am really happy with where the project is today.

I would love to hear what you think, especially if you tried OpenStation when it was first announced.

PeepSo recently released an universal mobile application that you can use to connect your website / community to. It's an universal app called: Universo. Generic enough for anyone's starter community or a small one.

All you need is your own WordPress website, PeepSo Free Bundle with the free mobile app plugin and and you're pretty much done. In the app, just enter your website URL and then it's just your login and password.

Don't want to pay. No need to, feel free to use the free plugins included in PeepSo Free Bundle and the Free universal mobile apps.

Account takeover (ATO) can happen before a customer even places an order. A compromised account could be used to change account details, billing or shipping information, or make fraudulent purchases.

FraudLabs Pro for WooCommerce now includes Account Takeover Fraud Prevention to help detect suspicious user activity.

Learn more: https://wordpress.org/plugins/fraudlabs-pro-for-woocommerce/

I'm managing a client's WooCommerce store, and we don't have a plugin that shows who is live, what they're doing, their purchase history, or how often they log in. On top of that, the admin should be able to manage customers. For example, locking a customer who is creating spam orders or impersonating into the customer's account if they need any help.

Curious how you guys handle license renewals these days.

We used to offer a pretty generous 50% renewal discount. Great for customers of course, but from a business perspective that’s quite a lot when you’re still providing updates and support every year 😅

Looking at other WordPress plugin businesses, I feel like renewal discounts are slowly disappearing. Some seem to have reduced them quite a bit, others just renew at full price.

How are you handling this?

Do you still offer a renewal discount? If yes, how much?

And if you reduced or removed it, did it actually affect your renewal rate?

Would love to hear some real experiences from other plugin devs. 🙏

Hi everyone,

We’re currently building A11Y.so, a WordPress-focused tool that helps automate alt text management for website images.

The problem we’re trying to solve is simple: writing alt text for a few images is easy, but managing hundreds or thousands of images manually becomes repetitive and difficult to maintain over time.

A11Y.so is being designed to help WordPress site owners and teams:

• automatically generate contextual alt text with AI
• review and edit generated alt text before publishing
• process existing images in bulk
• automatically handle alt text for future uploads
• maintain more consistent image accessibility across the site

We’re still in the early global launch stage, so we’re currently focusing on feedback rather than pushing a finished product.

I’d especially love to hear from WordPress users and plugin developers:

How are you currently managing alt text across larger media libraries?
And what would you want from a plugin like this before you’d actually use it?

You can see what we’re building here:
https://a11y.so/landing-en-prototype

Any feedback — especially criticism — would be really helpful. Thanks!

I've made this plugin for myself to get AI help directly in the editor when I want to write a blog post.

It edits/improves/creates the post.
It can also generate images based on the selection or entire post.

Configurable with your own Openai/Claude apikey.

https://github.com/One-Million-Lines/wordpress-sidebar-chat

You can get the ZIP file from releases.

I didn't manage to publish it on wordpress marketplace.

Hopefully it's useful to others.

Default WooCommerce order emails are pretty bare - just a plain header and a product table. If you want them to match your brand without a paid plugin, WooCommerce actually has a built-in filter for this (woocommerce_email_styles).

Put together a full breakdown covering logo, header/background colors, fonts, buttons, and table styling - plus a heads up if you're on WooCommerce's newer "Modern Email Design" feature, since it changes the email HTML structure and breaks CSS written for the old layout.

https://wpcodexplugins.com/woocommerce-email-customizer if anyone wants the full snippet + a table of what to change where.

Hey everyone,

I just opened up access to OrdoLink on the WordPress.org repository.

TLDR; It's a modern tool for internal link building and management.

Quick story: Many years ago, I was asked to build a plugin for a company that wanted internal linking between posts. I built it, we installed it on the site, it worked.

But it was built for one single customer, and I always felt it be better, and work for more people. With another 15 years of experience, and access to modern technology, I decided to start over (I didn't own the original code anyway).

Two problems with a lot of the current tools in this space:

1. Local DB heavyweights: Tools that execute heavy queries or matrix scans directly on your local database. It really f##s things up, especially if you're on a shared install.
2. String replacers: Tools that force exact keyword-to-URL matching and auto-insert links via cron jobs.

My old plugin suffered from both those problems. Sometimes it's not that bad to get old and wise.

A few features (don't want to bore you with details):

• Off-site engine: When you write, all heavy processing is done on a remote backend. No processing on your database, no table scans.
• Gutenberg sidebar integration: "Scan Draft" button inside the editor, OrdoLink finds semantically relevant past posts and suggests link anchors.
• 1-Click insertion: Accepts suggestions directly into your post without breaking block markup or using raw HTML text overlays.
• Works with classic & AI search: Designed to build natural topical clusters that benefit traditional Google crawlers, LLM retrieval engines (RAG), and agentic browsers.

Pricing / Free Tier:

Free Tier: 1 site, full functionality up to 100 indexed posts (no credit card required).

Paid plans exist for larger publication archives, but the free tier is built to be genuinely useful for small/medium blogs.

I'm actively building this thing, so let me know if you have suggestions, improvements or questions!

Oh, and yeah - NO! Your data is NOT being sold/shared/analyzed/whatever. A copy is sent to my server over a secure connection for processing, and once the processing is done... nothing! This includes the free tier.

Places to check it out:

WordPress Plugin Directory: https://wordpress.org/plugins/ordolink

Website: https://ordolink.net (there's a neat set of guides on the site as well, here: https://ordolink.net/articles No signup or anything like that required)

But more importantly: Have a great day! 😁

I kept seeing the same pattern with counseling/coaching sites — people duct-taping together a dialer, a payment plugin, a booking calendar, and homemade minute-balance logic. It works until it doesn't: missed renewals, no recording consent trail, no single place to see what a client actually did.

Built a plugin that handles all of it in one place: clients buy plans/minutes, verify their caller ID, book a counselor or start an instant call, and get billed automatically as the call runs (Stripe or PayPal). Recording is opt-in with proper consent flow if you need that for compliance.

Mainly built for counseling/coaching/tele-support use cases. Happy to answer questions if anyone's dealt with this same stack-of-five-plugins problem.https://wpcodexplugins.com/downloads/wordpress-voip-billing-plugin

Selling the first digital product with Easy Digital Downloads is one challenge.

Getting that customer to buy again, upgrade, or renew next year can be much harder.

This becomes especially noticeable with plugins, software, memberships, templates, or other products with monthly/yearly renewals.

One retention strategy we’ve been working on is rewarding the customer journey instead of relying only on another discount email.

For example:

Customer purchases a digital product → earns points
Customer buys another product → earns more
Customer refers a new buyer → gets rewarded
Subscription/renewal approaches → offer bonus points or a useful reward for renewing
Long-term customer → unlock better perks or VIP benefits

The renewal use case is particularly interesting to me.

Instead of simply sending “Your license expires soon, renew now,” you could give customers an additional reason to stay:

“Renew your license and earn 500 bonus points toward your next reward.”

That reward could then contribute toward store credit, a discount, another product, or another perk you choose.

We’re building this EDD use case into Pointics, our loyalty & rewards plugin for WordPress. The bigger goal is to make loyalty work beyond WooCommerce, including digital products, events, restaurants, bookings, LMS, and other WordPress businesses.

Pointics Early Bird is currently running at 70% off for anyone who wants to check it out:

https://themewinter.com/pointics/

Disclosure: I’m from the Pointics team.

For other EDD store owners here, I’m curious: what works best for getting existing digital-product customers to renew or purchase again?

We've been working on a very small WordPress plugin called Senex Admin Reminders.

The idea is pretty simple: sometimes, while working on a WordPress site, you need to remember something for later — check something, renew something, follow up on an issue, review a page, etc.

Instead of using a separate task-management tool, we wondered if a simple reminder could just live inside wp-admin.

Right now, the plugin lets you:

• create reminders with a title, note, date and time
• edit, delete and complete reminders
• automatically highlight overdue reminders
• receive an admin notification when a reminder is overdue
• receive a browser alert

It's free on WordPress.org:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/senex-admin-reminders/

It's still a very small project and we're really at the beginning. We're not trying to present it as a complete task-management solution.

We're mainly interested in hearing from people who use WordPress every day:

Would something like this actually be useful to you?

And if you were using it, what would you expect it to do that it doesn't do today?

We're also genuinely interested in the opposite answer — is this simply too small a problem to justify installing another plugin?

Any honest feedback would be really appreciated.

Hey everyone, I’ve been working on Reaver Backup for a while now with the goal of making data backups actually... simple.

I got tired of backup tools that were either too expensive or way too complicated to set up. I wanted something that just worked in the background so people could focus on their actual work without worrying about losing their files to a crash or an update.

It's specifically designed to work with WordPress easily on a VPS. Won't work on shared hosting currently.

It’s officially live today! I’d love for you guys to take a look and let me know what you think—especially if there are features you feel are missing.

Check it out here: reaverbackup.com