WJM: A Modular WordPress Architecture for Scalable Academic Publishing Infrastructure

The management of scholarly publishing workflows remains a persistent challenge for small-to-mid-scale academic institutions and independent journals, which frequently lack access to the costly enterprise platforms that dominate the market. This paper presents the Wisdom Journal Manager (WJM), an opensource, full-stack WordPress plugin engineered to provide a comprehensive infrastructure for managing academic journals, issues, papers, and authors. Built on a structured relational data model within the WordPress ecosystem, WJM integrates professional editorial workflow management, automated citation tracking via CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science APIs, ORCID-based author identification, DOI registration, role-based access control, AES-256-CBC encryption for API credential storage, and a centralized security audit system. The system architecture employs a modular design philosophy, separating concerns across distinct functional modules for database schema management, author unification, citation metrics, analytics, search, collaboration, and content automation. This paper details the system design rationale, the publication hierarchy model, the security and access control framework, the API integration layer, and the extensibility mechanisms provided through WordPress action and filter hooks. A comparative analysis positions WJM against existing solutions including Open Journal Systems (OJS) and commercial alternatives, demonstrating that a WordPress-native approach offers significant advantages in deployment simplicity, customization flexibility, and total cost of ownership for resource-constrained publishers. The plugin is released under the GNU General Public License v2 and is freely available for community adoption and extension.