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Ghost Plugins and the Rise of Terminal Agents · Wpfavs - Your favourite WordPress news

• 0:13
  So, Chris Morris published this massive study on WP Goldmine recently,
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  auditing 57,383 plugins in the official directory.
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  And, uh, the numbers are kind of wild.
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  It turns out 24% of plugins in the 10K to 100K active install band haven't been
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  updated in over two years.
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  Wait, a full quarter of them?
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  Almost one in four?
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  Yeah, literally 1,209 popular plugins that have real, active user bases,
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  sitting there with absolutely no maintainer.
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  That is, um, I mean, that is a huge chunk of the web just running on complete
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  autopilot.
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  But wait, why aren't people replacing them?
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  If a plugin hasn't been touched since 2024, why haven't site owners swapped it out?
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  Because they just work!
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  Look at the top ones on that abandoned list.
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  You have things like Limit Login Attempts, Layout Grid Block,
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  WP Downgrade.
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  They do one tiny job.
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  They don't break, they don't change their interface, and honestly,
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  users love that zero UI churn.
• 1:13
  Right.
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  They don't want a tool that redesigns its dashboard every six months or pushes,
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  uh, upgraded pro popups into the admin bar every time you log in.
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  it, it, it is the exact reason I ended up building wpfavs in the first place.
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  You know, you try to build a clean stack for a client site,
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  and you just want a simple micro utility to handle one basic task.
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  But if you try to buy or install a modern active alternative today,
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  it comes bundled with banner ads, upsell notices, heavy tracking,
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  and three new top level admin menus you never asked for.
• 1:45
  Mm, totally.
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  So site builders actively prefer a ghost plugin from 2022 that does two hundred
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  lines of clean PHP over a brand new commercial plugin that treats your admin
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  dashboard like a billboard.
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  Exactly.
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  But the risk, of course, is that eventually PHP versions tick up,
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  or security vulnerabilities surface, and suddenly that forgotten utility becomes a
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  liability.
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  Well, that is where things get really interesting with what is launching right now
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  in 2026.
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  We are seeing this huge shift away from those big bloated admin plugins,
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  toward tools that interface directly with native core APIs.
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  Take something like Novamira CLI, or Benjamin Intal's new Ahentic AI workspace
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  experiment.
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  Wait, Ahentic?
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  How does that one work again?
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  So Ahentic connects directly to your site using native WordPress APIs.
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  No external SaaS middleware, no heavy cloud servers, no complex custom MCP layer.
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  It sits there, reads the site structure, helps you launch pages,
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  and installs plugins through standard interfaces.
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  Huh.
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  And Novamira CLI lets you run terminal coding agents, right?
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  Like Claude Code or Codex CLI or Gemini CLI, straight from your terminal into the
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  site.
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  Yes!
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  You are running shell commands, querying the database, executing PHP,
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  doing file operations, all driven by a local terminal agent.
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  And think about what that does to traditional plugins.
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  If an agent can execute maintenance, optimize tables, or rewrite options directly
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  through core APIs, why do you need a massive heavy settings page inside wp admin at
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  all?
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  You don't!
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  The whole UI layer becomes redundant.
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  The terminal agent becomes your dashboard.
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  Right, it is a fundamental threat to the classic plugin model.
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  Software creators used to think they needed huge feature sets and elaborate
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  dashboards to justify a subscription.
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  But in this new environment, the winning products are going to be lightweight,
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  audit ready micro utilities.
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  Yeah, tools built to be monitored by automated scanners like Plugin Auditor,
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  where the code is clean, transparent, and completely unobtrusive.
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  You know, give me fifty lines of well structured PHP over a bloated plugin ecosystem
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  any day of the week.
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  It turns out the future of WordPress software looks a lot less like a giant software
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  suite, and a lot more like simple, silent tools that just get out of the way.