Foundation: Frontdesk

An accessible, self-hosted chat and contact widget for WordPress. Routes messages to an inbox or to an optional AI assistant — fast, private, no third-party chat service.

Part of the Foundation plugin series by Inkfire Limited.

Status

History: this repository was renamed

This plugin began as Conversa (foundation-conversa.php), which reached 1.0.12. That line was scrapped and rewritten as Frontdesk, currently 4.0.0-beta.4 with foundation-frontdesk.php as the bootstrap.

main now tracks the Frontdesk lineage, synced from the live installation on inkfire.co.uk. The final state of the old Conversa 1.x code is preserved on the pre-live-sync-20260805 branch if it is ever needed.

No site was running the 1.x line at the time of the switch, so nothing was stranded by the rename.

⚠️ No update channel

This plugin currently has no auto-updater. There is no plugin-update-checker, no Update URI, and no release has ever been published for the 4.x line. A fix cannot be pushed to any site running it — updates must be installed by hand.

Wiring this up requires:

1. Bundling plugin-update-checker (see foundation-ssh-access for the pattern).
2. Adding an Update URI header pointing at Inkfire-limited/foundation-frontdesk-ai.
3. Publishing a release with a ZIP asset whose top-level directory is Foundation-Frontdesk-v3, matching the installed folder name — otherwise WordPress will install a second copy rather than updating in place.

Note the installed folder (Foundation-Frontdesk-v3) differs from both the repository name and the plugin slug. Worth normalising when the updater is added.