WordPress.org

Viktor Szépe

Rogier Lankhorst

Aert

Mark

pepe

Konstantinos Xenos

Mathieu Paapst

mujuonly

Aurooba Ahmed

Johan Holst Nielsen

<p>WP Consent API is a plugin that standardizes the communication of accepted consent categories between plugins. It requires a cookie banner plugin and, at least, one other plugin that supports the WP Consent API.</p>
<p>With this plugin, all supporting plugins can use the same set of methods to read and register the current consent category, allowing consent management plugins and other plugins to work together, improving compliance with privacy laws.</p>
<p>WARNING: the plugin itself will not handle consent. It will show you how many plugins you have without Consent API support and will improve compliance on your site by ensuring smooth communication between cookie banner plugins and plugins that set cookies or track user data.</p>
<h4>What problem does this plugin solve?</h4>
<p>Currently, it is possible for a consent management plugin to block third-party services like Facebook, Google Maps, Twitter, etc. But if a WordPress plugin places a PHP cookie, a consent management plugin cannot prevent this.</p>
<p>Secondly, some plugins integrate the tracking code on the clientside in javascript files that, when blocked, break the site.</p>
<p>Or, if such a plugin’s javascript is minified, causing the URL to be unrecognizable and won’t get detected by an automatic blocking script.</p>
<p>Lastly, the blocking approach requires a list of all types of URL’s that tracks data. A generic API where plugins adhere to can greatly<br />
facilitate a webmaster in getting a site compliant.</p>
<h4>Does usage of this API prevent third-party services from tracking user data?</h4>
<p>Primary this API is aimed at compliant first-party cookies or tracking by WordPress plugins. If such a plugin triggers, for example, Facebook,<br />
usage of this API will be of help. If a user embeds a Facebook iframe, a blocking tool is needed that initially disables the iframe and or scripts.</p>
<p>Third-party scripts have to blocked by blocking functionality in a consent management plugin. To do this in core would be to intrusive, and is also not applicable to all users: only users with visitors from opt-in regions such as the European Union require such a feature. Such a feature also has a risk of breaking things. Additionally, blocking these and showing a nice placeholder requires even more sophisticated code, all of which should in my opinion not be part of WordPress core, for the same reasons.</p>
<h4>How does it work?</h4>
<p>There are two indicators that together tell if consent is given for a specific consent category, e.g., “marketing”:<br />
1) the region based consent_type, which<br />
can be opt-in, opt-out, or other possible consent_types;<br />
2) and the visitor’s choice: not set, allow, or deny.</p>
<p>The consent_type is a function that wraps a filter, “wp_get_consent_type”. If there’s no consent management plugin to set it, it will return false. This will cause all consent categories to return true, allowing cookies to be set on all categories.</p>
<p>If opt-in is set using this filter, a category will only return true if the value of the visitor’s choice is “allow”.</p>
<p>If the region based consent_type is opt-out, it will return true if the visitor’s choice is not set or is “allow”.</p>
<p>Clientside, a consent management plugin can dynamically manipulate the consent type and set several cookie categories.</p>
<p>A plugin can use a hook to listen for changes or check the value of a given category.</p>
<p>Categories and most other stuff can be extended with a filter.</p>
<h3>Existing integrations</h3>
<p>Categorized, and sorted alphabetically</p>
<h4>Example plugin</h4>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/rlankhorst/consent-api-example-plugin" rel="nofollow ugc">Example plugin</a>. The plugin basically consists of a shortcode, with a div that shows a tracking or not tracking message. No actual tracking is done 🙂</li>
</ul>
<h4>Consent Management Providers</h4>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/sirdata-cmp/" rel="ugc">Abconsent Sirdata CMP</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/beautiful-and-responsive-cookie-consent/" rel="ugc">Beautiful Cookie Consent Banner</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/clickio-consent/" rel="ugc">Clickio Consent</a></li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/complianz-gdpr/" rel="ugc">Complianz GDPR/CCPA</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://consent.studio/" rel="nofollow ugc">Consent Studio</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/consent-manager/" rel="ugc">consentmanager</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://conzent.net/" rel="nofollow ugc">Conzent</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/cookiebot/" rel="ugc">Cookiebot</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/cookiefirst-gdpr-cookie-consent-banner/" rel="ugc">CookieFirst</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/cookiehub/" rel="ugc">CookieHub</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/cookietractor/" rel="ugc">CookieTractor</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/cookie-law-info/" rel="ugc">CookieYes – Cookie Banner for Cookie Consent</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/gdpr-cookie-compliance/" rel="ugc">GDPR Cookie Compliance</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.webtoffee.com/product/gdpr-cookie-consent/" rel="nofollow ugc">GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin – CCPA Ready</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://getterms.io/consent-manager/" rel="nofollow ugc">GetTerms</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/iubenda-cookie-law-solution/" rel="ugc">iubenda | All-in-one Compliance</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/pressidium-cookie-consent/" rel="ugc">Pressidium Cookie Consent</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/trustarc-cookie-consent-manager/" rel="ugc">TrustArc Cookie Consent Manager</a></li>
</ul>
<h4>Consent Requiring Plugins</h4>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/add-to-any/" rel="ugc">AddToAny</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.appfromlab.com/product/woocommerce-utm-tracker-plugin/" rel="nofollow ugc">AFL UTM Tracker Plugin</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/burst-statistics/" rel="ugc">Burst Statistics</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-site-kit/" rel="ugc">Google Site Kit</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-google-adwords-conversion-tracking-tag/" rel="ugc">Pixel Manager for WooCommerce</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce/" rel="ugc">Woo</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-statistics/" rel="ugc">WP Statistics</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Demo site</h3>
<p><a href="https://wpconsentapi.org/" rel="nofollow ugc">wpconsentapi.org</a><br />
Below are the plugins used to set up the demo site:</p>
<ul>
<li>Complianz</li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/rlankhorst/consent-api-example-plugin" rel="nofollow ugc">The example plugin</a></li>
</ul>
<h4>javascript, consent management plugin</h4>
<pre><code>//set consent type
window.wp_consent_type = 'optin'

//dispatch event when consent type is defined. This is useful if the region is detected server side, so the consent type is defined later during the pageload
let event = new CustomEvent('wp_consent_type_defined');
document.dispatchEvent( event );


//consent management plugin sets cookie when consent category value changes
wp_set_consent('marketing', 'allow');
</code></pre>
<h4>javascript, tracking plugin</h4>
<pre><code>//listen to consent change event
document.addEventListener("wp_listen_for_consent_change", function (e) {
  var changedConsentCategory = e.detail;
  for (var key in changedConsentCategory) {
    if (changedConsentCategory.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
      if (key === 'marketing' && changedConsentCategory[key] === 'allow') {
        console.log("just given consent, track user")
      }
    }
  }
});

//basic implementation of consent check:
if (wp_has_consent('marketing')){
  activateMarketing();
  console.log("set marketing stuff now!");
} else {
  console.log("No marketing stuff please!");
}
</code></pre>
<h4>PHP</h4>
<pre><code>//declare compliance with consent level API
$plugin = plugin_basename( __FILE__ );
add_filter( "wp_consent_api_registered_{$plugin}", '__return_true' );

/**
* Example how a plugin can register cookies with the consent API
 * These cookies can then be shown on the front-end, to the user, with wp_get_cookie_info()
 */

function my_wordpress_register_cookies(){
    if ( function_exists( 'wp_add_cookie_info' ) ) {
        wp_add_cookie_info( 'AMP_token', 'AMP', 'marketing', __( 'Session' ), __( 'Store a unique User ID.' ) );
    }
}
add_action('plugins_loaded', 'my_wordpress_register_cookies');


if (wp_has_consent('marketing')){
//do marketing stuff
}
</code></pre>
<h4>Service-level consent</h4>
<p>In addition to category-based consent, the API supports service-level consent control. This allows consent management plugins to grant or deny consent for specific services (like ‘google-analytics’ or ‘facebook-pixel’) independently from their category. When checking service consent with wp_has_service_consent(), the API first checks if explicit consent exists for that service. If no explicit consent is set, it falls back to the consent status of the service’s category. This enables fine-grained control: a user might accept statistics cookies in general, but explicitly deny a specific analytics service.</p>
<p>Service consent can be checked and set both server-side (PHP) and client-side (JavaScript):</p>
<p>PHP:</p>
<pre><code>//check if a specific service has consent
if ( wp_has_service_consent( 'google-analytics' ) ) {
    //activate google analytics
}

//check if a service is explicitly denied
if ( wp_is_service_denied( 'facebook-pixel' ) ) {
    //service was explicitly denied by user
}

//set service consent
wp_set_service_consent( 'google-analytics', true ); //grant consent
wp_set_service_consent( 'facebook-pixel', false ); //deny consent

//listen for service consent changes
add_action( 'wp_consent_service_changed', function( $service, $consented ) {
    error_log( "Service {$service} consent changed to: " . ( $consented ? 'granted' : 'denied' ) );
}, 10, 2 );
</code></pre>
<p>JavaScript:</p>
<pre><code>//check service consent
if ( wp_has_service_consent( 'youtube' ) ) {
    //activate tracking
}

//check if explicitly denied
if ( wp_is_service_denied( 'facebook-pixel' ) ) {
    //service denied
}

//set service consent
wp_set_service_consent( 'youtube', true );

//listen for service consent changes
document.addEventListener( 'wp_consent_api_status_change_service', function( e ) {
    console.log( 'Service: ' + e.detail.service + ', consented: ' + e.detail.value );
});
</code></pre>
<p>Any code suggestions? We’re on <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/wp-consent-level-api" rel="nofollow ugc">GitHub</a> as well!</p>


WP Consent API


Louis was great helping me with an issue. Plugin works great and highly recommend!


Great Support Team


The wp‑consent‑api plugin provides a clean, standardized way to manage user consent across plugins and themes. It solves a core problem with a lightweight API. This is definitely a feature that should be integrated into WordPress core to ensure consistent and compliant consent handling by default.


Future of WP Consent Management

Simple Consent API to read and register the current consent category.

GDPR-Extensions.com

<p>Ensure GDPR compliance effortlessly with our advanced scanner that meticulously checks your website for cookies, external resources, and security issues. Generate detailed reports for validation and peace of mind. The Consent Manager works in parallel with more solutions developed by GDPR-extensions.com, where you can add GDPR-compliant YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Vimeo, TikTok, Google Reviews content elements, and more! For the full solution to work efficiently and for more control over managing your website, you should also install the GDPR Consent Manager WordPress extension.</p>
<h3>Custom Sections</h3>
<h3>GDPR Consent Manager</h3>
<p>The GDPR Consent Manager provides an easy way to manage cookies and external resources for your website and connected plugins. It now includes additional customization options to control how cookies and privacy statements are handled on your site.</p>
<ol>
<li>In the WordPress admin dashboard, locate and click on “GDPR Consent Manager” in the left-hand menu.</li>
<li>Inside the “GDPR Consent Manager,” you will see two tabs: one for websites and the other for schedulers.</li>
<li>Click on the update for a specific site, and you will be able to see two tabs: one for site connection & status and the other for the cookies widget. From the connection & status tab, you will be able to connect your website to the dashboard. From the cookie widget, you can manage and customize cookies.</li>
</ol>
<h3>New Customization Methods for Privacy Statement & Consent Manager</h3>
<p>This update introduces a new method for customizing both the consent manager and privacy statement:<br />
– <strong>Consent Manager Customization:</strong> Now allows deeper integration for customizing consent management popups, layout, and appearance.<br />
– <strong>Privacy Statement Customization:</strong> Easily adjust the text and style of your privacy statement directly through the plugin interface.</p>
<h3>How it Works</h3>
<p><strong>Add Your Website:</strong><br />
   – Sign up on gdpr-extensions.com dashboard (https://dashboard.gdpr-extensions.com/).<br />
   – Visit the websites page.<br />
   – Add your website Title and URL.<br />
   – A unique API key is generated for your website, allowing you to connect it to the plugin.</p>
<p><strong>Scan Your Website:</strong><br />
   – Visit the GDPR Scanner Tool on our dashboard (https://dashboard.gdpr-extensions.com/).<br />
   – Start a new scan.<br />
   – Select the website you would like to scan.<br />
   – Supports multi-site scanning with site map solution or our advanced crawler scanner.<br />
   – A report is generated with the cookies and external resources found on the website(s) you scanned.</p>
<p><strong>Generate Your Privacy Statement:</strong><br />
   – After scanning your website, navigate to the “GDPR Scanner Tool” section in your dashboard.<br />
   – Go to the <strong>Privacy Statement Generator</strong> tab.<br />
   – Click on Generate Statement and then select the website.<br />
   – Choose from 4 Ready-made templates that suit your website’s needs.<br />
   – Customize the content according to the structure of the selected template.<br />
   – Once you’re satisfied with the customization, create your Privacy Statement.<br />
   – Copy the generated API key from the dashboard and connect it in the plugin settings.<br />
   – Finally, run the scheduler to sync the Privacy Statement with your WordPress site.</p>
<h3>Scheduler Functionality</h3>
<p>The plugin includes two schedulers to automate tasks:<br />
1. <strong>GDPR Cookies Scanner Report:</strong> Fetches and syncs the cookies and external resources report.<br />
2. <strong>Privacy Statement:</strong> Fetches and syncs the customized privacy statement created via the Privacy Statement Generator.</p>
<p>Both schedulers allow for automatic updates, ensuring your website remains compliant and up-to-date.</p>
<h4>Can I customize the description of cookies?</h4>
<p>A: Yes, if you have GDPR Consent Manager installed, you can customize the style and text of the cookies for specific plugins.</p>
<h3>Third-Party Service</h3>
<p>The GDPR-Extensions-com – Consent Manager plugin enhances user privacy by providing a comprehensive solution for managing cookies on WordPress websites.</p>
<h3>Service Details</h3>
<p>The GDPR-Extensions-com – Consent Manager plugin integrates directly with <a href="https://www.gdpr-extensions.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">GDPR-Extensions.com</a> through our dedicated <a href="https://dashboard.gdpr-extensions.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Dashboard</a>. This proprietary service is designed to enhance GDPR compliance for WordPress websites. Our innovative extensions and plugins empower website builders to seamlessly integrate external content while respecting user preferences and data privacy rights. The plugin uses various API calls to connect with the dashboard, ensuring real-time compliance and management capabilities.</p>
<p><strong>Key Links:</strong><br />
– <a href="https://www.gdpr-extensions.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">GDPR-Extensions.com</a><br />
– <a href="https://dashboard.gdpr-extensions.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">GDPR-Extensions Dashboard</a><br />
– <a href="https://www.gdpr-extensions.com/privacy" rel="nofollow ugc">Privacy Policy</a></p>
<h3>Developer Notes</h3>
<p>This plugin uses the ‘gdprconsentmanager’ prefix for function names and database tables to ensure uniqueness and avoid conflicts with other plugins.</p>


GDPR-Extensions-com – Consent Manager

Short Description: Ensure GDPR compliance effortlessly. Scan for cookies, resources, and security issues. Generate reports.

WP Consent API vs GDPR-Extensions-com – Consent Manager