tl;dr:

15 years stuck in the same wp-admin, why don’t you try in playground the new wp-admin experience?

WordPress has spent the last fifteen years becoming capable of doing almost everything, yet somehow we have continued interacting with wp-admin in fundamentally the same way: click somewhere, load another screen, go back, open another tab because you do not want to lose the previous one, and after a while end up with ten different WordPress tabs scattered across your browser.

I find it quite funny that we all accepted this as completely normal.

Today WordPress is used to run stores, publications, membership sites, communities, LMS platforms, agencies and entire businesses. We have plugins that are effectively full applications, incredibly complex editing experiences, analytics, forms, CRM systems, media tools, commerce, automation and thousands of other things living inside the same installation. Yet the interface connecting all of them still assumes that, most of the time, you want to look at one thing at once.

And when you don’t, the browser has to solve the problem for us.

Browser tabs have essentially become the window manager of WordPress.

That is one of the ideas that eventually led us to OpenStation.

Why don’t we have windows?

It sounds ridiculously obvious when you phrase it like that, but that is exactly why I find the question interesting.

On a normal computer I can have my editor open next to a browser, keep a terminal in the background, drag files around, minimize something I want to return to later, or simply arrange my workspace around whatever I am doing at that moment. Nobody thinks about this as a feature anymore because it is just how computers work.

Then we open WordPress and suddenly that whole model disappears.

If I am editing a post and need something from the Media Library, I navigate away or open another tab. If I am checking an order while editing a product, another tab. If I want to compare two posts, another tab. If I am configuring something and need to check how another part of the site is set up, another tab.

There is nothing technically wrong with that, of course, and it has worked for years, but after building and using OpenStation every day I started noticing how much context we constantly throw away simply because wp-admin was designed around pages rather than workspaces.

That distinction matters much more today than it probably did fifteen years ago.

WordPress quietly became something much bigger

I keep describing WordPress as the operating system of the web, and obviously I do not mean that literally. What I mean is that WordPress has gradually accumulated many of the characteristics you would expect from a platform where applications live.

Plugins install capabilities into it. Users have identities and permissions. Applications share data. We have APIs, scheduled processes, notifications, media, editors, databases and an enormous ecosystem of software that knows how to work with the same underlying environment.

The strange part is that the interface never fully made the same transition.

We kept adding more applications to WordPress, but we continued presenting them largely as destinations in a menu.

OpenStation started from a very simple thought: what happens if, instead of redesigning every individual wp-admin page again, we change the environment in which those pages live?

That immediately opens a much larger set of possibilities.

A post editor does not need to replace your media library on screen. A WooCommerce order does not need to replace the product you were editing. A plugin screen does not necessarily need to occupy the entire browser just because you clicked its menu item.

They can simply be windows.

You can move them, resize them, minimize them, keep several of them open, organise them across different desktops and return to exactly what you were doing without recreating the context again.

The funny thing is that none of this feels particularly futuristic. Quite the opposite. We have been using computers this way for decades.

We just somehow never brought that interaction model into wp-admin.

The interesting part is not actually the windows

The windows are what people notice first because they are visual, but I think the more important idea is what happens once WordPress stops assuming that navigation must destroy context.

Suddenly the admin becomes a workspace.

You can have the Media Library next to the editor instead of travelling between them. You can keep an order visible while checking something else. You can open notes or widgets without abandoning your current task. Applications can coexist on the same desktop and eventually interact with each other in ways that become much harder when everything is isolated in separate browser tabs.

This is also where things like drag and drop become much more interesting.

If two applications are part of the same environment, moving an image, a product, a post or another WordPress entity between them can become an actual interaction instead of a sequence of copy, navigate, search, paste and navigate back.

And once you start thinking about WordPress this way, a lot of things that initially looked like unrelated OpenStation features start making sense together: windows, the dock, multiple desktops, widgets, the command palette and applications are all different pieces of the same idea.

The goal is not to decorate wp-admin until it looks like a desktop operating system. The goal is to make working in WordPress feel less like navigating a website and more like working inside an environment.

We don’t need to replace wp-admin to do this

This is probably the part I like the most about the approach.

WordPress already has an enormous ecosystem and rebuilding everything would be both unrealistic and, in my opinion, the wrong problem to solve. There are thousands of admin interfaces that already work, plugins developers have spent years building, and workflows users already understand.

OpenStation can sit on top of that rather than asking the ecosystem to start again.

The existing WordPress admin can continue being WordPress. Existing plugins can continue exposing their interfaces. What changes is how those interfaces are presented and how you move between them.

In some ways, I think that is much more interesting than simply designing another admin UI.

We are not trying to decide what every WordPress application should look like. We are trying to give those applications a better place to live.

And once you have that place, building actual OpenStation-native applications becomes possible as well. We have already been experimenting with things like a photo editor, project management tools and forms, but what excites me is not any individual application. It is the idea that WordPress can host an entire collection of tools that feel like they belong to the same workspace instead of a collection of isolated screens connected by a sidebar.

So why did it take fifteen years?

Probably because there was never a single moment where the old model stopped working.

WordPress evolved gradually. A new menu here, another plugin there, a more sophisticated editor, WooCommerce, custom post types, page builders, analytics, SEO tools and so on. Each addition fitted reasonably well into what already existed, so there was never an obvious reason to stop and question the basic interaction model.

But those small changes accumulated.

The WordPress of today asks considerably more from wp-admin than the WordPress of fifteen years ago did, and I think that eventually creates an opportunity to revisit assumptions that once seemed completely reasonable.

The assumption we are questioning with OpenStation is a very simple one:

Why should opening something in WordPress mean leaving everything else behind?

After spending months working this way, I now notice it every time I go back to the traditional flow. I open something, realise I need another part of WordPress, create another browser tab and immediately think: why am I doing this outside WordPress when WordPress itself could manage the workspace?

That is probably the best way I can explain what we are building.

WordPress has had applications for a very long time.

Perhaps what it has been missing all these years is somewhere for those applications to actually live together.

By the way, don’t forget you can always try OpenStation without even installing it in your site, using WordPress playgrounds