Bit Connect

A community forum for WordPress. Your users open topics for feature requests, bug reports and feedback; everyone else upvotes and comments; and you move each topic through the stages of your roadmap so people can see what you are actually building.

This repository holds the complete source of the free plugin — the one published on WordPress.org. Everything the plugin ships is built from what is here, and the sections below are enough to build it yourself.

• Plugin page: https://bitapps.pro/bit-connect
• License: GPL-2.0-or-later (see LICENSE)

Building the plugin

The compiled JavaScript and CSS under assets/ are not committed — they are generated. To produce them:

git clone https://github.com/bit-apps-pro/bit-connect.git
cd bit-connect
composer install
pnpm install
pnpm build:free

That writes assets/ (WordPress admin panel) and assets/client/ (the public portal). At that point the directory is the plugin: copy it into wp-content/plugins/bit-connect and activate it.

Requirements: PHP ≥ 8.2, Node ≥ 20, pnpm ≥ 9, and Composer 2. No private registry, credential or submodule is involved — a plain git clone is enough, and no .env is needed to build.

An installable zip

To get the file you would upload under Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin:

pnpm prod:free-zip

That builds the frontend, resolves PHP dependencies with --no-dev, stages the shipped files, strips development artefacts, and writes build/bit-connect-<version>.zip. The version comes from the Version: header in bit-connect.php. Your working tree is left as it was — development dependencies are reinstalled once the staging copy has been taken.

Without a local toolchain

The build workflow runs those same steps on every push to main and every pull request, then uploads the result. Open a run under Actions → build and download bit-connect-zip from its Artifacts section; it holds the same bit-connect-<version>.zip you would get locally. Artifacts are kept for 14 days.

Pushing a v<version> tag — v1.0.0, matching the Version: header — runs the same build and then publishes that zip as a GitHub Release, which is the durable place to fetch a given version. The workflow refuses a tag whose version disagrees with the header. WordPress.org itself is still updated from a local pnpm prod:free-zip.

How the build is wired

Piece	Where
Admin panel entry and config	vite.config.mts, frontend/admin/
Portal entry and config	vite.config.client.mts, frontend/client/
Portal server-side render	backend/app/SSR/ — rendered by PHP per request, not prebuilt
PHP plugin	bit-connect.php, backend/

The frontend is React + TypeScript, bundled by Vite, with Ant Design and Tailwind (namespaced with a prefix so it cannot collide with a theme). PHP dependencies are re-namespaced at install time by Imposter under BitApps\BitConnect\Deps\, so two plugins bundling the same library never fight.

Developing

pnpm dev            # admin + portal dev servers
pnpm test           # Vitest
pnpm ts-check       # TypeScript
pnpm lint           # ESLint (writes fixes)
pnpm test:e2e       # Playwright, against DEV_DOMAIN
composer test       # PHPUnit (needs tests.config.php — see the setup guide)
composer analyze    # PHPStan
composer lint       # php-cs-fixer + PHPCS (writes fixes)

To work on the plugin, clone it into the plugins directory of any WordPress install you can run locally:

cd wp-content/plugins
git clone https://github.com/bit-apps-pro/bit-connect.git
cd bit-connect
composer install && pnpm install
pnpm build:free      # once, so the plugin has assets to activate with

Activate Bit Connect in wp-admin, then run pnpm dev. It starts two Vite servers — the admin panel on :3000 and the portal on :3001 — and writes a .port file. That file is how PHP knows to load the dev servers instead of the built files, so both hot-reload while you edit. Stopping pnpm dev removes it and the plugin goes back to serving assets/; if a crash ever leaves .port behind, delete it by hand.

cp .env.example .env if you need to change where the dev servers bind, serve them over HTTPS, or point the end-to-end tests at your site. Every value in it is optional.

docs/project-setup-instruction.md walks through the whole setup, including wp-cli.

About the Pro add-on

Some features are provided by Bit Connect Pro, a separate add-on plugin that is not hosted on WordPress.org and whose source is not in this repository. Everything in the free plugin works without it.

You will see a few *.pro.tsx placeholder modules in the admin source. They exist so the import graph resolves: each free screen dispatches on IS_PRO_ACTIVE, which is a compile-time false in this build, so the bundler removes the placeholder and its branch entirely. Nothing in assets/ comes from them — they carry no implementation to begin with.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome here. Development happens in a private monorepo that holds both the free plugin and the add-on, so accepted changes are applied there and land back in this repository with the next release; the commit history here is one publication per released version rather than a running log.