Horse Tools

Language: English · Tiếng Việt

All-in-one WordPress toolkit: a contact chat button, shortcodes & snippets, security hardening, privacy, media optimisation, SEO, cleanup and more — in one plugin, instead of a dozen separate ones.

Horse Tools is an actively-maintained, security-hardened fork of Foxtool by Fox Theme (see Credits).

Features

• Contact chat button — a floating multi-channel contact widget with 29 built-in channels (phone, SMS, e-mail, Zalo, Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber, Line, WeChat, Signal, Shopee, Grab, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, TikTok, YouTube, X, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitch, Spotify, VK, Discord, Google, Maps and more) plus a Custom button that points anywhere, 17 button skins, a built-in icon picker (5,000+ Tabler icons), business hours (online / away), a greeting bubble, pre-filled messages, and scan-to-open QR codes on desktop.
• Mobile Services panel — a conversion-focused slide-up/toast panel to surface your key pages and offers, with several layouts, themes and display modes.
• Popup — an image/content popup with 4 layouts, 13 entrance effects, 4 display positions (centre, corner toast, bottom bar) and 4 triggers (on load, after N seconds, after scrolling, or exit-intent).
• Shortcodes & snippet manager — create reusable content/HTML/JS snippets (edited in the familiar WordPress Visual/Text editor — insert links, images and formatting, or paste raw code), 20+ built-in shortcodes for conditional display, layout (accordion, tabs, alerts), dynamic data and QR codes, a "find where a shortcode is used" tool, and an on/off manager.
• Security hardening — limit login attempts, block user enumeration, security response headers, disable the file editor, REST/XML-RPC controls and header cleanup.
• Privacy — self-host Google Fonts and scan the front end for external requests.
• Media — WebP/AVIF conversion, watermarking and thumbnail control.
• SEO — FAQ rich-result schema generated from the article's own Q&A headings, a table of contents, automatic 301 redirects on slug change with a 404 log, permalink and image-alt tidying, and Google Search Console / Indexing API integration.
• Contact-click measurement — records which contact buttons visitors actually press (phone, Zalo, Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber…) as GA4 events, using whatever analytics tag the site already loads. Nothing is stored on the site.
• Optimisation & health — site optimisation options and a one-click site-health audit.
• Cleanup — database and content cleanup tools.
• Admin & login — customisable admin display and colour scheme, configuration presets (Blog, WooCommerce, Performance, Security), and a customisable WordPress login screen.
• Extras — WooCommerce helpers, mail testing, user role/permission tools, post & page utilities, notifications and popups.

Where everything lives

The admin menu is organised by the job you are doing, not by which module a setting happens to belong to. Horse Tools in the WordPress sidebar opens an Overview page listing the groups; each group is one page with tabs across the top and a single Save button.

Two more entries sit below them: Extend, where optional modules are switched on and off, and About.

Only the group you open is loaded, so a screen you never visit costs nothing. Old bookmarks to the previous per-module pages still work — they redirect to the group and tab that setting now lives on.

Installation

From within WordPress (recommended)

1. Download the latest horse-tools-x.y.z.zip from the Releases page.
2. In WordPress: Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the ZIP, then Install Now.
3. Activate Horse Tools. To update later, upload the newer ZIP and choose Replace current with uploaded.

Manually

1. Unzip and upload the horse-tools folder to /wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate the plugin from the Plugins menu.

Coming from Foxtool? Horse Tools imports Foxtool's settings automatically the first time you activate it. Nothing is overwritten if Horse Tools settings already exist.

Requirements: WordPress 6.0+ · PHP 8.1+

Languages

The interface is fully translatable and ships with bundled translations:

• Vietnamese (vi) — complete, maintained by the author.
• Indonesian, Thai, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Arabic — machine-generated starting points; improvements welcome.

The plugin also loads any translation placed in wp-content/languages/plugins/.

Privacy

Horse Tools does not send any data about your site to us or any third party. It only contacts external services you explicitly configure (Google Indexing API / Search Console with your own service account, Google login with your own OAuth client, or Telegram notifications with your own bot). No site URL, admin e-mail, licence check or usage statistic is transmitted.

Documentation & changelog

• User guides: Chat / contact button guide · phiên bản Tiếng Việt.
• Full feature notes and the complete changelog live in readme.txt (WordPress.org format).
• Release downloads and notes: Releases.

FAQ

Is it free? Yes — free and open-source under the GPLv2 licence.

I currently use Foxtool. What do I do? Deactivate Foxtool and activate Horse Tools; it imports Foxtool's settings automatically on first activation. Don't run both at once.

Will it slow my site down? No. Each feature's CSS/JS loads only on the pages that use it, and nothing is added to the front end for features you haven't switched on.

Does it send my data anywhere? No — see Privacy. It only contacts services you explicitly configure with your own credentials.

How do I update? Download the newer ZIP from Releases and upload it via Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, then choose “Replace current with uploaded”. Your settings are kept.

I can't find the Popup (or another feature) — where is it? Most modules are opt-in. Turn them on under the Extend page first; the feature's tab then appears inside the group it belongs to — see Where everything lives. There is also a search box on the Overview page that finds a setting by name.

How do I show a promotional popup? Enable the Notify module on the Extend page, then go to Customers → Popup: switch it on and choose a layout, entrance effect, position and trigger.

Does the plugin do anything for SEO? Yes — the SEO group covers permalinks, image alt text, external links, FAQ rich results, 301 redirects with a 404 log, Google Indexing API and the table of contents.

Can I use it in my language? Vietnamese is complete; 11 more languages ship as machine-translated starting points. You can also drop your own .mo into wp-content/languages/plugins/.

My security scanner flagged a file in this plugin. Is it malware? No. The whole plugin contains exactly two eval() calls, both in inc/php-snippet.php, and that file is the PHP snippet feature — running PHP you have written yourself is what it is for, and no plugin can offer that without eval(). Scanners flag the word on sight, without reading the code.

One of the two is eval( 'if ( false ) { … }' ): the branch is never entered, so nothing runs. It exists only to catch a syntax error when you save a snippet, instead of letting a broken snippet take the site down.

The other one runs your snippet, and only after two gates: two-factor authentication must be on for the account, and the code must still match the signature stored when it was saved — so a snippet altered by anyone who did not go through this screen stops running rather than executing. If a snippet ever crashes a page, it is switched off automatically and you are told which one.

If you do not use PHP snippets, turn the Shortcode module off under Extend and the file is never loaded at all.

Where do I report a bug or request a feature? Open a GitHub issue.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome — bug reports, translation fixes and feature ideas. Please open an issue to discuss larger changes first.

Credits

Horse Tools is developed and maintained by Trần Duy Thuận.

It began as a fork of Foxtool by Fox Theme, released under GPLv2. Fox Theme built the original feature set over several years and it remains the foundation of this plugin; that work is gratefully acknowledged. The original project is no longer maintained by its author, and Horse Tools continues its development independently — rebranded, security-hardened, with dependencies refreshed and the interface rebuilt.

Licence

Distributed under the GPLv2 or later licence — see license.txt.