WP Plugin Toolkit

WP Plugin Toolkit is the open-source foundation Perxel uses to build WordPress plugins. It has two parts: a template repository for the backend and a shared admin UI kit for the frontend. It is the standard base for every plugin Perxel develops, including Perxel Image Optimizer and Perxel AI Translate, both approved for the WordPress.org plugin directory.

The problem

When you start a new plugin, most of the early time doesn't go to features but to rebuilding the scaffolding: folder structure, autoloading, activation and deactivation hooks, build setup and CI. Then comes rewriting the CSS and JS for the settings pages, and each plugin ends up a little different in layout and behaviour.

WP Plugin Toolkit puts both parts into one shared starting point, so the effort goes into the business logic.

The template repository: wp-plugin-starter

wp-plugin-starter is a GitHub template repository. Creating a new repo from it gives you a working plugin straight away: a codebase with a namespace and PSR-4 autoloading, a sample Settings screen rendered in the shared layout, PHPCS and WordPress Plugin Check running in CI, and a workflow that packages the install zip and releases it to WordPress.org.

Personalising it for a new plugin is a find and replace of six naming tokens (namespace, display name, slug, repo name, constant prefix and hook prefix), with no build step.

The admin UI kit: wp-plugin-ui

wp-plugin-ui is a light admin UI layer rendered on the server with PHP and a little plain JS, with no framework and no build step. It provides a main layout with a feature sidebar and a content area, plus a few ready-made components that sit on top of wp-admin's own CSS instead of replacing it.

The UI kit is vendored into each plugin at vendor/perxel-ui/, the same model as Action Scheduler: committed to the plugin repo, packaged in the zip and updated with a script. The runtime loader always picks the highest version among the active plugins, so an old copy in one plugin can't break or change the interface of another.

Passed WordPress.org review

Every plugin submitted to WordPress.org has its code read by the Plugin Review team before approval, mostly for security and WordPress coding standards. Two plugins built on this toolkit have been approved:

• Perxel Image Optimizer. Converts WordPress images to WebP on the server.
• Perxel AI Translate. Translates WPML posts with AI through OpenRouter.

The review team's feedback is fixed in the toolkit itself, so every plugin built later, including custom plugins for clients, starts from the same standard.

Benefits

The toolkit shortens the time to start a new plugin and keeps Perxel's whole plugin catalogue consistent in both backend architecture and admin UI. An upgrade to a shared part reaches every plugin through a vendor update.

Both repos are public on GitHub so developers and agencies can read them or use them as a starter for their own projects. The toolkit is the base for Perxel's custom plugin development service.

Footnotes

1. wp-plugin-starter
2. wp-plugin-ui
3. Action Scheduler
4. Perxel Image Optimizer on WordPress.org
5. Perxel AI Translate on WordPress.org