Baton

A conductor’s wand, properly called a baton, is a thin, lightweight stick used by music directors to amplify and guide physical gestures.

Baton is a WordPress plugin that adds a thin, lightweight layer used by admins to orchestrate site workflows based on the WP Abilities API. It provides field-level input mapping to control data passing between registered Abilities, and each workflow is also exposed as it's own Ability (baton/workflow-{id}) for nesting or use in external tooling.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.9+
• PHP 7.4+

Try it on Playground

Opens a disposable WordPress 6.9 site with Baton installed and lands on Tools → Baton.

Installation

1. Clone this repository into wp-content/plugins/baton.
2. Activate Baton in the WordPress Plugins screen.

Prebuilt editor assets are included in build/ — you do not need Node or npm to use the plugin.

Usage

Tools → Baton — create workflows in the visual editor (vertical step cards, data filters on connectors), run them from the admin, and reference saved workflows as baton/workflow-{post_id} in other workflows.

Roadmap / Known Gaps

• Workflow-level initial input → step 1 data filter in the editor (runtime supports initial_input; UI exposure is limited).
• CLI & Command Palette integrations for "external" workflow execution.
• ActionScheduler integration for scheduling step/workflow execution.
• Database/transient integration for persisting workflow output.
• Advanced drag-and-drop workflow building UI.
• Code snippet nodes for fully custom data processing.
• Mapping auto-suggest from schema paths.
• Replace list table with DataViews when appropriate in core.
• User-facing copy pass on mapper warning strings.

Development

See CONTRIBUTING.md for pull request prerequisites and command reference.

Building the editor UI

Only needed when changing files under src/. The workflow editor is a React bundle built with @wordpress/scripts:

cd wp-content/plugins/baton   # or your clone path
npm install
npm run build

After making any changes within src/, run npm run build (or npm start while developing). The built files land in build/ and are enqueued on the workflow edit screen.

Before you push

Matches the php-lint and js CI jobs — usually a few seconds, no Docker:

composer install
npm install
npm run check

That runs PHP syntax (php -l), PHPCS, PHPStan, and ESLint on src/. Run integration tests separately when you change PHP behavior:

npm run test:php

WordPress.org directory assets

Files under .wordpress-org/ are not included in the plugin zip. They are stored in Git for convenience and copied to the WordPress.org SVN assets/ directory (top level, alongside trunk/) when publishing.

Trunk exclusions for releases live in .distignore (same file the 10up deploy action will use later).

Build release tree (until SVN deploy is wired up)

npm run release:org              # release/baton/ (SVN layout) + release/baton-{version}.zip
npm run release:org -- --check   # run static checks first

The script uses .distignore for trunk (aligned with 10up) and rsyncs .wordpress-org/ → assets/. It also checks that baton.php Version matches readme.txt Stable tag.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later — see LICENSE.