WordPress Browser Extension

Heads-up: This codebase is in discussion to become the official WordPress browser extension. Active development is happening here in the interim; the eventual home will be in the WordPress org.

A browser extension that detects WordPress sites and puts admin shortcuts, hosting info, and developer tools in your toolbar. Chrome is the primary target; Safari is supported via a companion Xcode project.

Install

Chrome

1. Download the latest zip from Releases
2. Unzip to a folder
3. Open chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode
4. Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder

Safari

See SAFARI.md — requires Xcode and a one-time Xcode Run (⌘R).

Features

• Detect WordPress — Identifies WP sites automatically via REST API links, generator tags, asset paths, and body classes. The toolbar icon has three states: gray with a slash for non-WP, gray for WP, blue for WP and logged in.
• Edit this page — Jump straight to the editor for posts, pages, categories, tags, authors, and custom post types — including hyphenated CPT slugs like case-study. Keyboard shortcut: Alt+Shift+E (Option+Shift+E on Mac), customizable at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
• View / Preview from the editor — On wp-admin edit screens, see the published page or preview a draft (with nonce) in one click. Works for all post types.
• + New content menu — Mirrors the admin bar's "+ New" dropdown with the post types your role can create.
• Identify the host — Detects WP Engine, WordPress VIP, Pantheon, Kinsta, Flywheel, Cloudways, WordPress.com, Pressable, and local dev environments. Cached per origin for 90 days.
• Toggle the admin bar — Hide or show the front-end admin bar per site, without flash. Honors your profile setting and surfaces a clear hint when WP itself has the bar disabled.
• One-click sign out — Inline confirm, then logs out via the admin bar's nonce so WordPress's "are you sure?" page is skipped.
• Site Information panel — Active theme (name, version, author) and a wrap of plugin pills with version-on-hover. Pills link to each plugin's homepage. Powered by the WP REST API for admins, with DOM-scanned slugs as a graceful fallback.
• Developer tools — Mobile preview window (iPhone-sized), bypass page cache, clear cookies + site data (preserving your WP login), Highlight Blocks (outline wp-block-* elements with a breadcrumb tooltip), and a Query Monitor toggle when QM is installed.

Development

The popup UI is React + @wordpress/ui, bundled with 10up-toolkit. The background service worker, content scripts, and lib/*.js are still vanilla — no build step there.

npm install
npm run build     # production bundle → dist/
npm start         # watch mode

Run smoke tests for lib/ with cd test && npm install && npm test.

Credits

Substantial contributions from Fabian Kägy: the React popup architecture, the Safari companion Xcode project, the Site Information panel, and the Block Inspector — all merged from his fork at fabiankaegy/wp-detective with authorship preserved.

License

MIT

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