🛡️ Site Sentinel

Plugin & Theme Lock for WordPress Sites

Stop clients from breaking their own site — without stopping updates.

Why Agencies Need This

Every agency has lived this story: you hand over a beautifully built site, and two weeks later you get a panicked call because someone deactivated Elementor "to see what would happen," or switched the active theme to Twenty Twenty-Four while poking around the Themes screen.

Site Sentinel is a tiny, zero-bloat safety lock built for exactly that moment. It doesn't limit what a client can do with content — it just removes the two buttons that can take a site down in one click: Deactivate (on critical plugins) and Activate (on any theme but the approved one). Everything else — including automatic and manual plugin updates — works completely normally.

• ✅ No dashboard clutter, no bloated framework, no third-party dependencies.
• ✅ Client-safe by default, developer-friendly by design.
• ✅ You always retain access via the Agency Key, with a documented emergency bypass.

Core Features

Screenshots

The settings screen — check off protected plugins, lock the active theme, and set the Agency Key. Once a key exists, this screen itself locks too, so a client can't just uncheck their way past the shield.

Plugins screen, shield armed — protected plugins show a "🔒 Locked by Agency" badge in place of Deactivate.

Themes screen, shield armed — every theme except the locked one is marked "Locked by Agency" and its Activate control is hidden.

How It Works

1. Install and activate the plugin.
2. Go to Site Sentinel in the admin menu.
3. Check the plugins you want protected, lock the active theme, and set an Agency Key.
4. Save. From this point on, protected controls are hidden site-wide for every admin until someone enters the Agency Key.
5. When you need to make a change, unlock your own session with the key, do your work, then re-lock (or let the session expire automatically after 2 hours).

Nothing here touches wp_update_plugins cron, the auto-update system, or the Plugins API — Site Sentinel only filters UI action links and blocks explicit deactivate/activate requests. Updates, security patches, and auto-updates continue completely unaffected.

The "Handover" Process (Client Onboarding)

This is the recommended workflow agencies use with Site Sentinel when handing a site off to a client:

1. Before handover: Configure the Plugin Shield and Theme Shield for every business-critical component (page builder, WooCommerce, SEO plugin, security plugin).
2. Set a unique Agency Key per client/site — don't reuse the same key across your whole portfolio.
3. Do not share the Agency Key with the client. It is your key, not theirs. The client's admin account should never need it for day-to-day work.
4. Document the Emergency Unlock constant in your internal client runbook (not in anything the client can access) so any team member can recover access if the key is ever lost.
5. Hand over the site. The client can create content, manage orders, and use every plugin normally — they simply can't turn off the pieces that keep it standing.
6. Future agency visits: unlock your session, make changes, re-lock before you leave.

Installation

1. Download the plugin ZIP (or clone this repo into wp-content/plugins/).
2. Activate Site Sentinel: Plugin & Theme Lock from the Plugins screen.
3. Go to Site Sentinel in the admin sidebar and configure your shields.

Releasing a New Version (for maintainers)

Every push to main runs the CI workflow (.github/workflows/ci.yml): it lints all PHP files across PHP 7.4 / 8.1 / 8.3 and checks that the plugin header Version: and the readme.txt Stable tag: are in sync. A mismatch fails the build before it ever reaches a release.

To publish an installable release ZIP on the Releases page:

1. Bump the version number in both:
   • site-sentinel.php → the Version: header
   • readme.txt → Stable tag:
2. Commit the bump to main.
3. Tag the commit and push the tag, using a v prefix:

   git tag v1.1.0
   git push origin v1.1.0

4. The Release workflow (.github/workflows/release.yml) then automatically:
   • Lints every .php file.
   • Verifies the tag matches the plugin header and readme.txt versions (fails the release otherwise).
   • Builds a clean, installable site-sentinel-1.1.0.zip — stripped of .github, .git, dev configs, and anything listed in .distignore — with the correct top-level site-sentinel/ folder structure WordPress expects.
   • Generates a .sha256 checksum for the ZIP.
   • Publishes a GitHub Release for the tag with the ZIP and checksum attached and auto-generated release notes from the commit history.

No manual zipping, no forgetting to strip dev files — push a correctly versioned tag and the release appears on its own.

Technical Notes

• Hooks used: plugin_action_links, handle_bulk_actions-plugins, pre_update_option_template / pre_update_option_stylesheet, admin_init request guards, admin_menu (submenu removal), load-theme-editor.php / load-plugin-editor.php.
• Settings are stored in a single option (cv_guard_settings); the Agency Key is stored as a salted hash (wp_hash_password()), never in plain text.
• Session unlocks are per-user transients that expire automatically after 2 hours.
• Self-protection: Site Sentinel is never permanently locked. If a developer checks it as a "protected plugin," it is treated exactly like any other protected plugin — deactivatable the moment the Agency Key is unlocked.
• Multisite network-level theme activation and the Customizer's theme-preview flow are covered by the pre_update_option_template/stylesheet guard, but if you rely on heavily customized network-admin flows, test in staging first.

Support

Built and maintained by CV Infotech. For support, custom modifications, or agency licensing, contact support@cvinfotech.com or visit cvinfotech.com.

License

GPLv2 or later — see LICENSE.