Status: Experimental feature plugin

System-wide presence and awareness for WordPress.

WordPress has no way to know who is logged in, what screen they are on, or which posts are being edited — without writing to shared tables like wp_postmeta or wp_options. High-frequency writes to those tables invalidate caches site-wide (#64696). This plugin uses a dedicated wp_presence table with a 60-second TTL to provide that awareness with zero cache side effects.

"This idea of presence I think is really cool and seeing where people are... you log into your WordPress, I see oh Matias is moderating some comments, Lynn is on the dashboard maybe reading some news... that idea of like you log in and you can kind of see the neighborhood of like who else is also there." — Matt Mullenweg, WordPress 7.0 planning session

▶ Watch the demo on YouTube (no audio)

npm install
npx wp-env start
npx wp-env run cli wp presence demo 10 --keep-alive

Then open localhost:8888/wp-admin/ (admin / password).

1. Browser sends presence-ping via Heartbeat
2. Server upserts into wp_presence
3. Server reads the room and returns entries in the heartbeat response
4. Client diffs a signature of user IDs and swaps HTML when content changes
5. Client-side interval re-evaluates idle state every 5s between heartbeat ticks

Post types opt in via add_post_type_support( 'post', 'presence' ).

Creates presence entries alongside _edit_lock postmeta when a post lock is refreshed via Heartbeat. Both systems coexist.

All features require edit_posts.

• @josephfusco

Sponsored by the Core team. Updates posted on make.wordpress.org/core with the tag #presence-api.

Questions and bug reports: GitHub Issues.