Back From The Grave? — WPMS Network Global Inserts
Back From The Grave? — WPMS Network Global Inserts
Posted by Ruben Storm · WordPress · Open Source · Community
There's a repo in my GitHub that I haven't touched in years. Dusty, quiet, and sitting exactly where I left it sometime around 2012. It's called WPMS Network Global Inserts — a WordPress Multisite plugin I built back when WordPress 3.3 was the hot new thing, AdSense was the monetization dream of every blogger, and "network admin" felt like a superpower.
It never made it big. It never even made it medium. But it worked, it solved a real problem for me, and — at least a couple of people found it useful.
Then life happened, priorities shifted, and the plugin quietly passed away.
What It Was
WPMS Network Global Inserts was a WordPress Multisite plugin that let the Network Administrator inject HTML into specific zones of every blog across the entire network — from a single settings panel. No touching individual sites. No logging into ten dashboards. One place, one save, done.
The injection points covered:
- Page Header — HTML/JavaScript above all page content
- Pages Footer — HTML/JavaScript below all pages
- Post Header — above blog post content
- Post Center — injected right at the "read more" split
- Post Footer — below blog post content
- Global Footer — network-wide footer on all blogs
Each zone had its own alignment option, and you could include or exclude specific blog IDs from receiving the inserts — handy if you wanted to skip a test blog or a client subsite. The big use case was Google AdSense: inject your ad code once, it appears across your entire WordPress network. Clean, centralized, no mess.
The plugin was based on earlier work called WPMS Global Content by Neerav Dobaria, which I extended and rebuilt for my own needs. For 2012, it was a solid little tool.
Why It Died
Honestly? I stopped maintaining it because I stopped needing it. Life moved on, my projects changed, and the plugin sat there quietly collecting digital dust. No dramatic reason — just the slow fade that happens to a lot of solo developer side projects.
It's also worth being honest: the code is old. It uses deprecated APIs from the WordPress 3.3 era. If you tried to run it on a modern WordPress installation today, you'd see warnings you'd rather not see. The plugin is, for all practical purposes, archived.
But Wait — Does Any of This Still Make Sense?
WordPress Multisite is still very much alive. The New York Times runs on it. Mercedes-Benz uses it for regional sites. UNICEF deploys it for global chapters. Agencies and universities run entire fleets of subsites on a single WordPress installation. The use case hasn't gone away.
And the core idea — centralized HTML injection across a network — is still a real workflow problem. Anyone managing a WordPress Multisite who wants to add a network-wide announcement bar, inject analytics snippets across all subsites, place ads consistently, or drop a cookie notice everywhere at once still has to cobble something together.
Or does a good solution already exist? That's part of what I want to find out.
The Question I'm Asking You
Should I pull this plugin out of the graveyard?
I'm genuinely on the fence. It would be a fun rebuild — modernize the codebase, add a proper React-based settings UI, make it compatible with the Block Editor era, and expand it to work on both Multisite and single-site installs. But maybe nobody needs this anymore and I'd be investing time into a solution looking for a problem.
So I want to hear from the community:
1. Do you run WordPress Multisite? Is network-wide HTML injection something you've ever needed or hacked around?
2. Would a modern version be useful to you? What would you need it to do that the 2012 version didn't?
3. What should it become? A pure Multisite tool? A general-purpose snippet injector for single sites too? An ad-placement manager? Something else?
4. Is there already a plugin that does this well? If I'm reinventing an existing wheel, point me at it. I'd rather know.
The repository is still there at github.com/rubenstorm/wpms-network-global-inserts. Read the original code, the README, the changelog — all exactly as I left it.
The tombstone is carved. The question is whether it gets a resurrection.
What do you think?