Presence API Feature Plugin

The Presence API is an experimental feature plugin that provides a system-wide awareness layer — who is logged in, what admin screens they are on, and which posts they are editing.

This idea of presence I think is really cool and seeing where people are… you log into your WordPress, I see oh Matias is moderating some comments, Lynn is on the dashboard maybe reading some news… that idea of like you log in and you can kind of see the neighborhood of like who else is also there.

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress 7.0 planning session

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Problems this aims to solve

There is currently no way to see who else is logged into the WordPress admin at the same time.
Posts being actively edited by another user are only surfaced when a lock collision occurs, by which point work may already overlap.
The post list provides no indication of which posts have active editors until a user tries to open one.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Try it yourself in WordPress Playground: 5-user blueprint. The blueprint creates 5 editor accounts with live presence spread across admin screens and posts, so the widgets, admin bar, and post list are populated the moment Playground boots — no second browser or incognito window needed.

See it at scale: 40-user blueprint. Same setup, 40 seeded editors — useful for seeing how the widgets, admin bar, and post list handle density.

What the plugin provides

Dashboard widgets: “Who’s Online” and “Active Posts”
Admin bar online indicator with avatar stack for on-screen presence
Post list “Editors” column
Users list “Online” filter
REST endpoints and WP-CLI commands
Post-lock bridge (coexists with existing _edit_lock behavior)

All features are gated on the edit_posts capability. Full technical details are in the GitHub repository.

Background

During WordPress 7.0 development, discussion in #64696 identified that storing high-frequency ephemeral data in shared tables causes persistent cache invalidation site-wide. This feature plugin was built to test that workload independently using a dedicated ephemeral data table with a 60-second TTL. Data flows through the existing Heartbeat API. The plugin was presented at a core dev chat and subsequently transferred to the WordPress GitHub organization. It was submitted to the WordPress.org plugin directory on April 6, 2026.