Extra Chill Studio

The team workspace for publishing, social operations, transcription, analytics, and AI-assisted workflows across the Extra Chill network.

Studio runs at studio.extrachill.com as a team-gated WordPress application. It gives contributors and editors focused tools outside the standard WordPress admin while preserving WordPress as the canonical content and identity system.

Product Surfaces

Blog

The Blog tab is a frontend block editor for Extra Chill articles.

• Creates drafts directly on the main Extra Chill site from the first meaningful save.
• Autosaves through WordPress core's per-user autosave endpoints.
• Restores newer autosaves when a writer returns to a draft.
• Supports main-site media browsing and uploads.
• Opens a real main-site preview from the live editor state.
• Submits finished work into the editorial review queue.
• Notifies the writer when an editor publishes the article.
• Shares active draft context with Roadie and refreshes accepted external edits.

Editors review pending work from Studio wp-admin → Posts → Studio Submissions, then finish metadata and publication in the main site's native editor.

Team documentation lives at docs.extrachill.com/studio/.

Socials

The Socials tab provides capability-aware access to shared brand accounts.

• Publishes captions and media through Data Machine Socials.
• Polls asynchronous cross-post jobs and shows per-platform results.
• Browses and uploads network media.
• Reads, filters, and replies to supported platform comments.
• Supports a review path for team members who cannot publish directly.

The remaining Socials roadmap centers on migrating approvals to Data Machine PendingActionStore, adding reviewer actions, platform-aware previews, and finishing the unified inbox.

Transcribe

The Transcribe tab sends recordings to the Sweatpants/Whisper pipeline.

• Uploads audio directly to the transcription service.
• Supports model, speaker diarization, and filler-removal options.
• Polls short-running jobs in the browser.
• Creates a main-site draft for the uploader when processing finishes.
• Sends a completion email and supports transcript viewing, copying, and download.

QR Codes

The QR Codes tab uses the existing Extra Chill QR ability to generate, preview, and download print-ready PNG files for any URL.

Network

The Network tab gives team members a private view of platform health, including traffic, audience growth, retention, surface activity, and conversion paths.

Access Model

Studio uses capabilities owned by the Extra Chill Users plugin.

• Logged-out visitors receive the shared login/register experience.
• Logged-in non-team users receive a team-only access message.
• Team members need the access_studio capability.
• Social account access is separately gated by the brand Socials capability.
• Blog review requires the native edit_others_posts editor capability.
• Administrators retain operational access.

Permission checks fail closed when the team-membership dependency is unavailable.

Architecture

Studio is a WordPress plugin with a server-rendered Gutenberg block and a React application.

Extra Chill team identity
          ↓
  Studio block shell
          ↓
 ┌────────┬─────────┬────────────┬──────────┬─────────┐
 │  Blog  │ Socials │ Transcribe │ QR Codes │ Network │
 └────────┴─────────┴────────────┴──────────┴─────────┘

Important boundaries:

• Users and team roles: Extra Chill Users
• Canonical articles, revisions, and autosaves: WordPress core on extrachill.com
• Social accounts and platform operations: Data Machine Socials
• Transcription execution: Sweatpants
• AI chat context: shared Extra Chill chat/Roadie integration
• Analytics data: owning Extra Chill analytics abilities
• UI primitives and tokens: Extra Chill Components and Tokens

Studio orchestrates these owner-layer capabilities. It does not create parallel identity, post, autosave, social, or analytics systems.

Editorial Lifecycle

team access
    ↓
main-site draft + autosaves
    ↓
preview
    ↓
pending review
    ↓
editor metadata + revision
    ↓
schedule or publish
    ↓
writer notification

The draft is born on the main site and remains there throughout the lifecycle. Studio records provenance instead of moving posts between subsites.

Development

Requirements:

• WordPress 6.9+
• The PHP version declared in extrachill-studio.php
• Node.js and npm
• extrachill-users
• Extra Chill theme and shared component packages
• Feature dependencies for Socials, transcription, analytics, and chat

Install and verify:

npm ci
npm run test:unit
npm run typecheck
npm run build

Source lives under src/blocks/studio/. Generated release assets are written to build/ during packaging and are not an editable source tree.

Key server modules:

inc/compose/             Cross-site editorial REST and lifecycle support
inc/review-queue.php     Editor-facing blog review queue
inc/social-drafts.php    Legacy Socials approval path pending migration
inc/transcription/       Completion callback and email handoff
inc/abilities/           Studio-owned WordPress abilities
inc/team-experience/     Team adoption instrumentation

Roadmap

The current roadmap is tracked in GitHub issues. Primary areas are:

1. Migrate Socials approval to Data Machine PendingActionStore.
2. Add signed reviewer actions and a pending Socials queue.
3. Add platform-aware previews and finish Socials inbox state.
4. Build a contributor and intern operating flow around existing WordPress content primitives.
5. Add deliberate inline AI editing and diff review to Compose.
6. Investigate real-time collaboration against current WordPress/Gutenberg primitives.
7. Remove obsolete client and editor compatibility debt.

See open Studio issues for scoped work and dependencies.

Related Repositories

• extrachill-users — identity, team roles, profiles, and notifications
• extrachill-network — multisite and cross-site foundations
• data-machine — automation, pending actions, jobs, email, and abilities
• data-machine-socials — social platform operations
• data-machine-editor — inline editing and diff review
• extrachill-components — shared interface components

License

GPL-2.0-or-later