OST Site Inspection

OST Site Inspection collects the checks you run before a site goes live, or before you hand it over to a client, into a single admin screen.

Main features

• Visibility status — Reports “can it be reached” and “is it exposed to search engines” as two separate axes. It inspects HTTP Basic authentication, maintenance mode, the noindex setting and robots.txt.
• Checklist — About 50 pre-delivery items, managed as two layers: an automated result and a status set by the person in charge. Notes, reviewer and review time are recorded, and the sheet can be exported as CSV or as a printable report.
• Domain check — Finds URLs pointing at unintended domains in post content, custom fields, options, taxonomies and theme files. Useful for catching staging URLs left behind after a migration.
• Logs — Records PHP errors, uncaught exceptions and fatal errors in the database and shows them in the admin screen, so you do not need FTP access to read them.
• Site Health — Summarises the results of the WordPress Site Health tool.

Shared settings across Orienst plugins

The settings screen lives under “Settings > Orienst Settings”. This page is shared with other plugins by Orienst Inc. (such as OST AIO Smart Schema), so installing several of them on the same site still produces a single menu entry.

The company and office information on the “Common Settings” tab is shared by all of these plugins, and editing it from any one of them saves the same values. Uninstalling this plugin does not delete that shared data, because the other plugins use it.

Design decisions

• No files are written to the server. Logs are stored in the database, so no log file is ever placed in a publicly reachable directory.
• No mu-plugin or drop-in is created. Nothing opaque is left behind on the server.
• No dependency on WP_DEBUG / WP_DEBUG_LOG. Errors are recorded even when those constants are disabled.
• Rendering the admin bar or an admin page never triggers an HTTP request. The visibility status is always shown, but when no cached value exists the plugin displays a lightweight result that requires no request. The site is only contacted when the Visibility tab is opened or when “Re-check now” is pressed.
• The automated result and the reviewer’s status are kept separate. Running a check never overwrites a human decision; applying automated results is an explicit action (“Apply automated results”).
• Automated judgement is limited to items that can be decided mechanically. Ambiguous items are presented as information only, and the decision is left to a person.
• No bulk URL replacement. The domain check only reports findings; it never rewrites the database.

Note: the admin interface of this plugin is currently provided in Japanese. Translations can be contributed at translate.wordpress.org once the plugin is published.

External services

This plugin does not use, connect to or send any data to a third-party service or API.

The plugin does send HTTP requests, but only to the following destinations, and only while an administrator is running a scan from the plugin’s screens:

• The site’s own URL. Used to determine the public visibility status (HTTP status, Basic authentication, maintenance mode, noindex, robots.txt) and to fetch pages for the checklist. Triggered when the Visibility tab is opened, when “Re-check now” is pressed, and during a detailed scan.
• URLs that already appear in the site’s own content. Link targets and image URLs written in posts are requested to detect broken links and oversized images. This happens only during a detailed scan, which is started manually.

No data about the site or its users is sent to Orienst Inc. or to any other party. The number of outbound requests is capped by the “Maximum number of external requests” option on the Settings tab; setting it to 0 disables requests to any host other than the site itself.

The host names listed in the “Excluded hosts” option are not contacted by the plugin. They are domains that the domain check ignores when scanning the site’s own content for unintended URLs.