Description
Activate, deactivate, and manage plugins across every site in your network from one screen.
Managing plugins on a multisite network is messy. Deactivating a plugin at the network level can leave it quietly running on individual sites — but how would you know? Finding out means clicking through site after site, and fixing it means holding your breath while a bulk action either works or takes the network down.
Beardo Multisite Activation Console was built for one purpose: to save you that time. Every plugin, every site, one grid — with every change made carefully, recorded, and impossible to lock yourself out with.
Activation Grid
See the whole network at a glance: which plugins are network-active, which are switched on for individual sites, and which are off everywhere. Sort, search, and filter the way you already do in the WordPress admin — no spreadsheets, no site-hopping.
Quick Change
Change the status of any plugin on any site right from the grid. The console never fires off a giant batch and hopes for the best: each change runs on its own, with a health check first. If a plugin would break one subsite, that site is flagged and the rest of your network carries on untouched.
Clear Stale
Networks that have been around a while collect clutter — plugins marked active on a site and network-active at the same time. The console spots the redundant entries and clears them without deactivating anything that’s genuinely in use.
Dead References
Deleted a plugin from the server but WordPress still thinks it’s active somewhere? Those leftover entries hang around in your database for years. The console finds them and removes them.
Logs
Every change is written to a network-wide audit log: who did it, on which site, what they changed, and whether it worked. Filter by person, site, or plugin. When a client asks “who turned that off?”, you’ll have the answer in seconds.
Guardrails
A built-in protected list means the console will never deactivate itself, a drop-in, or anything else that would lock a super admin out mid-change. Developers can extend that list with a single filter.
Feels like part of WordPress
Built on the same DataViews interface WordPress itself uses, so there’s nothing new to learn. It follows your admin color scheme, works in right-to-left languages, and looks like it belongs.
Free, and nothing leaves your server
No paid tier, no external services, no tracking, no phoning home. The plugin reads and writes only your own network’s plugin state and its own audit log.
Who it’s for
- Agencies and hosts managing client sites on one network
- Universities, franchises, and publishers with dozens or hundreds of subsites
- Anyone who has ever bulk-activated a plugin and immediately regretted it
Requires a multisite network. Only super admins can use the console, and every request is protected by WordPress nonces and capability checks.
Support & Documentation
- Learn more: beardo.tools/multisite-activation-console
- Get help: help.beardo.tools
External Services
This plugin makes no external HTTP requests. It reads and writes only local
WordPress data: the network’s plugin activation state, the sites in the
network, and its own audit log table. No data is sent to any third-party
service, and no tracking, telemetry, or analytics of any kind is collected.
Third-Party Libraries
The admin interface is a React application built from the plugin’s own source
in src/ using @wordpress/scripts. The shipped build/index.js is compiled
output — not obfuscated code — and contains only the plugin’s source plus the
standard WordPress packages it imports (@wordpress/components,
@wordpress/dataviews, @wordpress/element, @wordpress/api-fetch,
@wordpress/i18n, @wordpress/icons), all GPL-compatible.
The full, unminified source is available in the plugin’s public repository.
Screenshots


Installation
- Upload the plugin folder to
/wp-content/plugins/ - Network Activate it from Network Admin Plugins
- Open Network Admin Plugins Activation Console
This plugin requires a WordPress multisite installation. It has no effect on single-site installs.
FAQ
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Does this work on a regular (single-site) WordPress install?
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No. The console is built for multisite networks and must be network activated. On a single-site install it does nothing.
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Can it break my network by turning off something critical?
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It’s designed specifically so it can’t. Changes run one at a time with a health check first, so a problem on one site stays on that site. And a protected list stops it from ever deactivating itself or anything that would lock a super admin out. Developers can add to that list with the
beardo_mac_protected_pluginsfilter. -
Who can use the console?
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Only super admins (users with the
manage_network_pluginscapability). Regular site admins won’t see it. -
What does the audit log record?
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Who made the change, which plugin, what they did, which site it applied to, whether it succeeded, and when. You can filter the log by person, site, or plugin.
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Does it send any data anywhere?
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No. There are no external calls, no analytics, and no tracking of any kind.
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What happens if I uninstall it?
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The audit log table is removed. Nothing else on your network is touched — your plugins stay exactly as they were.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Beardo Multisite Activation Console” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
ContributorsTranslate “Beardo Multisite Activation Console” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.0
- Initial public release.
- Activation matrix — every plugin’s state (network active, per-site active, or off) across all subsites in a single DataViews grid
- Safe transitions — one state change per request, so a fatal error on one subsite never takes down the whole batch
- Dry-run validation — backend health checks run before any change is executed
- Stale dual-state cleanup — detects and strips redundant per-site entries for network-active plugins without deactivating anything
- Dead-reference cleanup — removes activation entries for plugins no longer present on disk
- Audit log — every state transition recorded network-wide with acting user, target site, action, and result, filterable by user, site, and plugin
- Guardrails — a filterable protected list (
beardo_mac_protected_plugins) prevents the console from deactivating itself or locking out a super admin - Admin theme compatibility — console colors flow through a plugin-scoped CSS token layer, and the focus ring follows the user’s admin color scheme
- Full RTL support
This release follows an internal beta series; 1.0.0 is the first version published to WordPress.org.
