Family

RangerHQ Radio is the oldest sibling in the RangerHQ family. The four-button-search affordance and the per-user-wp_usermeta storage pattern were both pioneered here, then ported to other family members.

Current family members

RangerHQ Radio — this project

Surface: WordPress admin
Function: SomaFM player with track history + favourites + four-button search to Spotify / YouTube / Apple / Bandcamp + optional pop-out window
Repo: git.davidtkeane.com/ranger/rangerhq-radio
Distribution: WordPress.org Plugin Directory (LIVE)

RangerHQ Buddy — WordPress sibling

Surface: WordPress admin
Function: A small virtual pet for every WP admin user; Phase E will tie its mood to your site's actual health
Repo: git.davidtkeane.com/ranger/rangerhq-buddy
Distribution: WordPress.org Plugin Directory (in round-2 review at time of writing)

Buddy inherits Radio's wp_usermeta storage pattern and Tier-1 admin discipline. Different product (virtual pet, not radio) — same architectural ethos.

RangerHQ Tuner — Chrome sibling

Surface: Chrome browser (toolbar popup + optional New Tab Page override)
Function: Same idea as Radio, but in the browser instead of wp-admin. Plays SomaFM, logs tracks, four-button search out to the major services
Repo: git.davidtkeane.com/ranger/rangerhq-tuner
Distribution: LIVE on the Chrome Web Store since 2026-06-09

Tuner is directly ported from Radio:

The four-URL templates in src/lib/history.js are byte-for-byte identical to radio_search_urls() in inc/history.php here.
The FIFO-500-with-dedup-against-last-entry rule is the same.
The (unknown) artist skip is the same.
The Stations / History / Favourites tab structure on Tuner's New Tab Page mirrors the History tab here.

The architectural translation from PHP wp_usermeta to JavaScript chrome.storage.local happened cleanly because Radio's data layer was small and self-contained.

Coming next

RangerHQ Logbook

Surface: WordPress admin
Function: Site-changes audit log for WordPress administrators. Captures who did what when across plugins, themes, options, users — searchable + exportable
Status: In design

Family-wide promises (the "RangerHQ promise")

Every plugin or extension in the RangerHQ family commits to:

✅ GPL v2 or later — open source, audit-able, fork-able
✅ No telemetry, ever — nothing leaves your site / browser / device
✅ No third-party JavaScript SDKs — the code you install is the code that runs
✅ No CDN-fetched fonts or images — assets are bundled, period
✅ Narrow permissions — request only what's needed, justify the rest
✅ Per-user / per-device privacy — no cross-account leakage, no shared site-wide state where per-user makes more sense
✅ Hand-rolled, no build step where possible — vanilla PHP on WordPress, vanilla JS in the browser
✅ Tier-1 admin discipline — single h1 per admin page, escaped output everywhere, accessibility-respecting, no inline <style> blocks
✅ Keep-a-Changelog format — every release documented at the file-level detail

If a plugin or extension can't meet all of these, it doesn't ship under the RangerHQ name.

Identity

Logo: the RangerHQ helmet (the gladiator / Spartan-style silhouette)
Palette: dark base #0f1411, accent green #6dbf7a (RangerHQ green), cream #f4e9b7 (highlights)
Typography: system fonts, no web fonts
Voice: matter-of-fact, "what it does today" + "what it doesn't do yet"
Maker: David Keane, Dublin, Ireland

The lineage in one paragraph

RangerHQ Radio was the first plugin in the family. The four-button-search pattern emerged because David wanted a way to save tracks he heard on SomaFM, without embedding the auth complexity of Spotify or YouTube. Once the pattern proved itself on wp.org (Radio went live 2026-06-04), it was ported byte-for-byte to RangerHQ Tuner (Chrome) so the same idea would work in the browser. RangerHQ Buddy is a different product (virtual pet) but inherits the per-user-wp_usermeta storage pattern and the wp.org submission discipline from Radio's experience.

Each new family member ships faster than the last, because the architectural patterns are already proven and the wp.org / Chrome Web Store submission playbook is already written.