RangerHQ Buddy

Adopt a small virtual companion that lives in your WordPress admin. Right now Buddy just exists — they bob, they blink, they show their mood. As the plugin grows, their stats will come to reflect how well you take care of your WordPress site itself: published posts feed them, outdated plugins make them sick, clearing spam makes them happy.

Gamifies WordPress maintenance with a bit of charm.

What it does today

• Dashboard widget shows your Buddy with name, mood, and four stat bars (hunger, happiness, health, energy).
• Dedicated Buddy admin page for the bigger view, with the same character and stats.
• Settings page where you can rename your Buddy.
• Each WP admin user gets their own Buddy stored per-user in user_meta. Nothing leaves your site database.
• About page explaining the plugin and the roadmap.

What it does not do yet

• No interactions — feed, play, clean, sleep are coming in Phase B.
• No time-based stat decay yet — that is Phase C.
• Only one species available right now — Phase D will add a dog, dragon, sprite, and more.
• The headline feature — having Buddy stats reflect your actual WP site health (post counts, outdated plugins, spam queue) — is Phase E.

Privacy

RangerHQ Buddy stores its data per-user in the WordPress user_meta table on your own site. No data is sent anywhere. No telemetry. No third-party JavaScript. No external services are contacted except the update checker, which queries the public Gitea release endpoint at git.davidtkeane.com to see if a new version is available.

About the RangerHQ family

RangerHQ Buddy is part of the RangerHQ plugin family by David Keane. Sister plugins include RangerHQ Radio (an admin-only internet radio player) and the upcoming RangerHQ Logbook.