Governance Guardrails

Governance Guardrails is a file-based WordPress governance plugin for site owners, agencies, and managed WordPress teams that want important operational rules to live in code instead of scattered database settings.

You define a policy in a PHP configuration file. Governance Guardrails reads that file on each request and applies the configured rules. This makes the policy easy to review, version-control, and deploy consistently across environments or multiple sites.

Governance Guardrails can help you manage:

• Feature toggles such as XML-RPC, comments, feeds, the Customizer, widgets, application passwords, user registration, WP-Cron, and related admin features.
• Admin UI cleanup, including admin bar nodes, dashboard widgets, menu pages, and admin footer text.
• Runtime capability denials by role without changing stored role definitions in the database.
• Upload governance, including allowed MIME types and per-file size limits.
• Content behavior such as revisions, autosave intervals, oEmbed, and emoji loading.
• Login behavior such as password reset restrictions, generic login errors, and post-logout redirects.
• HTTP security headers and other hardening options such as pingback removal, author archive handling, file editing restrictions, and staging noindex headers.
• Head cleanup for RSD, WLW manifest, shortlinks, feed links, and REST API discovery links.
• Locked options so selected wp_options values are pinned from code.
• Custom governance callbacks for site-specific rules.

This plugin does not claim to secure a site by itself. It is intended as a governance and consistency tool that helps keep selected WordPress settings and behaviors aligned with your site’s operational policy.

Must-use plugin support

Governance Guardrails was originally built for must-use plugin deployment. It can still be installed that way by copying governance-guardrails.php and the governance-guardrails/ directory into wp-content/mu-plugins/.

For WordPress.org installation, it can also be installed and activated as a normal plugin. In that case, the included sample config is used from the plugin directory unless you define a custom config path.

To use a custom config file, add this to wp-config.php:

define( 'GOVGUARD_CONFIG', '/absolute/path/to/governance-guardrails-config.php' );

The shipped sample config lives at governance-guardrails/governance-guardrails-config.php.

Config loading is fail-open. If the config file is missing, unreadable, has a syntax error, or does not return an array, Governance Guardrails does not enforce governance rules and logs a warning instead of crashing the site.

WP-CLI

When WP-CLI is available, Governance Guardrails registers the wp governance command set.

Examples:

• wp governance status
• wp governance check
• wp governance audit
• wp governance audit --severity=high
• wp governance diff
• wp governance get features --format=json
• wp governance mimes

Normal plugin installation

1. Upload the plugin files to the /wp-content/plugins/governance-guardrails/ directory, or install the plugin through the WordPress Plugins screen.
2. Activate Governance Guardrails through the Plugins screen in WordPress.
3. Review the included sample config at governance-guardrails/governance-guardrails-config.php.
4. For a site-specific policy, define GOVGUARD_CONFIG in wp-config.php and point it at your own config file.
5. If WP-CLI is available, run wp governance check to validate the active config.

Must-use plugin installation

1. Copy governance-guardrails.php and the governance-guardrails/ directory into wp-content/mu-plugins/.
2. Review or replace the config file at wp-content/mu-plugins/governance-guardrails/governance-guardrails-config.php.
3. Optionally define GOVGUARD_CONFIG in wp-config.php to point at a config file outside the plugin directory.
4. If WP-CLI is available, run wp governance status or wp governance check.