Perdita Core

Free companion plugin for the Perdita WordPress theme: forms, SEO, caching, security, newsletters and more (GPL)

by Eric Rosenberg · github.com/ericrosenberg1/perdita-core · website

★ 0stars

Install

Download source zip No release zip yet

This is the repository archive. It installs, but the folder name will carry the branch suffix and updates will not flow.

Install straight from GitHub with WP-CLI:

wp plugin install https://github.com/ericrosenberg1/perdita-core/archive/refs/heads/main.zip

No built-in updater. New versions won't appear under Dashboard → Updates. Install new releases yourself, or let Git Updater track the repository.

Readme github.com/ericrosenberg1/perdita-core ↗

The free companion plugin for the Perdita theme. It carries everything the theme can't: SEO, forms, page caching, security hardening, analytics, email, backups, a small store, an MCP server, and the module registry that turns each of those on and off.

Why it exists

Perdita is going to the wordpress.org theme directory, and the theme review rules keep plugin territory out of a theme: SEO output, forms, caching, analytics, shortcodes, custom post types, and custom roles. All of that used to live in the theme's inc/. It lives here now.

That makes the standard three-piece freemium shape:

Piece	What it owns
Perdita (theme)	Design. The token document, the CSS generator, the Customizer, fonts, patterns, the AI provider router, `Perdita_Crypto`, the child theme generator, migration from other themes.
Perdita Core (this plugin, free)	Behavior. The module registry and all thirteen free modules.
Perdita Pro (paid plugin)	More modules, registered into this plugin's registry through the `perdita_register_modules` action.

How it hangs together

The plugin requires the Perdita theme (as the active theme or the parent of one). Plugins load before a theme's functions.php, so this one boots on after_setup_theme priority 0, checks Perdita_Core::theme_is_ready(), and registers nothing but a dismissible admin notice when the theme isn't there.

perdita_core() returns the bootstrap. It exposes ->modules, ->seo (the SEO store), ->forms, ->shortcodes and ->section, plus references to the theme's ->settings, ->ai, ->css and ->fonts so a module handed the bootstrap as $core reaches everything by the same property names it used when the theme owned it. The theme keeps a __get() shim, so third-party code that still writes perdita()->seo keeps working.

Module enable state lives in this plugin's own perdita_core option, not the theme's perdita_settings. Existing choices are copied across once, on the first boot after install.

Development

# syntax check everything
find . -name '*.php' -not -path './dist/*' -exec php -l {} \;

# run the smoke suite against a real WordPress
bash tests/run.sh /path/to/wordpress

# move the theme, Perdita Core, Perdita Pro, and the license server to one version
# (the three ship together and warn in wp-admin when their versions differ)
bin/bump-version.sh 0.18.0-alpha

# build a release zip and its update manifest (refuses a version the siblings do not share)
bin/build-release.sh

# build the wordpress.org submission zip (no self-hosted updater)
bin/build-release.sh --wporg

The build script packages git archive HEAD, so it refuses to run on a dirty tree and the artifact can only ever contain committed code. See tests/README.md for what the suite covers and why it doesn't run through wp-cli.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.