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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:
<ul>
<li>Feature toggles such as XML-RPC, comments, feeds, the Customizer, widgets, application passwords, user registration, WP-Cron, and related admin features.</li>
<li>Admin UI cleanup, including admin bar nodes, dashboard widgets, menu pages, and admin footer text.</li>
<li>Runtime capability denials by role without changing stored role definitions in the database.</li>
<li>Upload governance, including allowed MIME types and per-file size limits.</li>
<li>Content behavior such as revisions, autosave intervals, oEmbed, and emoji loading.</li>
<li>Login behavior such as password reset restrictions, generic login errors, and post-logout redirects.</li>
<li>HTTP security headers and other hardening options such as pingback removal, author archive handling, file editing restrictions, and staging noindex headers.</li>
<li>Head cleanup for RSD, WLW manifest, shortlinks, feed links, and REST API discovery links.</li>
<li>Locked options so selected <code>wp_options</code> values are pinned from code.</li>
<li>Custom governance callbacks for site-specific rules.</li>
</ul>
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.
<h4>Must-use plugin support</h4>
Governance Guardrails was originally built for must-use plugin deployment. It can still be installed that way by copying <code>governance-guardrails.php</code> and the <code>governance-guardrails/</code> directory into <code>wp-content/mu-plugins/</code>.
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 <code>wp-config.php</code>:
<pre><code>define( 'GOVGUARD_CONFIG', '/absolute/path/to/governance-guardrails-config.php' );
</code></pre>
The shipped sample config lives at <code>governance-guardrails/governance-guardrails-config.php</code>.
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.
<h4>WP-CLI</h4>
When WP-CLI is available, Governance Guardrails registers the <code>wp governance</code> command set.
Examples:
<ul>
<li><code>wp governance status</code></li>
<li><code>wp governance check</code></li>
<li><code>wp governance audit</code></li>
<li><code>wp governance audit --severity=high</code></li>
<li><code>wp governance diff</code></li>
<li><code>wp governance get features --format=json</code></li>
<li><code>wp governance mimes</code></li>
</ul>

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