Intercessor

The best free prayer request plugin for WordPress. Collect, manage, and organize prayer requests with moderation, privacy controls, reports, exports, a prayer wall, and prayer history.

See It In Action
Intercessor has been actively used on our website for several years, serving as a trusted platform for prayer requests and community prayer support. You can explore the live version, submit a prayer request, or pray for others through our online prayer wall here: Submit Prayer

Submission

• Prayer Form block — visitors submit requests directly from any page or post, with no coding required.
• Anonymous submissions — requesters can share publicly while hiding their name.
• Private requests — marked private and visible only to administrators and prayer managers.
• Login gate — optionally require a WordPress account before submitting.
• Auto-registration — guests can be automatically registered as WordPress users with a requester role on submission.
• Google reCAPTCHA — v2 checkbox or v3 invisible score-based spam protection.
• Rate limiting — configurable per-email daily submission cap.
• Profanity filter — flags rather than blocks requests, so moderators decide.
• Terms and privacy acceptance — optional checkbox with configurable label and URL.

Moderation

• Full workflow — approve, reject, mark private, archive, and restore individual requests.
• Bulk actions — process multiple requests at once from the list table.
• Moderator notes — private internal annotations on each prayer request, never shown publicly.
• Status audit trail — immutable history log for every status change, including actor and timestamp.

Requester Management

• Requester database — every submitter is tracked as a deduplicated requester record.
• WordPress user linking — optional link between a requester record and a WP user account.
• Tabbed requester detail view — five-tab page covering profile, prayer requests, status history, notes, and delete.
• Requester notes — private admin notes attached directly to a requester record, separate from prayer notes.

Display

• Prayer Wall block — displays approved requests with pagination and a live “I prayed for this” counter.
• Prayer History block — shows the full status timeline for a single request.

Notifications

• Admin email — notified on every new submission.
• Requester email — notified when their request is received and when its status changes.
• Scheduled prayer reports — configurable cron job sends periodic prayer activity digests.

Roles and capabilities

• Three custom roles — prayer_manager (full management access), prayer_warrior (read and export), requester (minimal WP access for auto-registered submitters).
• Six custom capabilities — edit_prayers, manage_prayer_settings, view_prayer_reports, export_prayer_reports, view_prayer_sensitive_data, read_private_prayers.

Data and Exports

• CSV exports — prayer requests, requesters, prayed counts, and plugin settings.
• REST API — 9 endpoints covering requests, requesters, history, and notes.
• Six database tables — all data stored locally; nothing sent to external services except reCAPTCHA.
• No external dependencies — BerlinDB is bundled; no Composer required on the server.

Source Code & Development

The full source code for Intercessor is publicly available on GitHub:
https://github.com/victoraigbeghian/intercessor

The Gutenberg block editor scripts in assets/js/blocks/ are built from their unminified source files in src/blocks/ (also included in this plugin) using webpack. To rebuild the blocks from source:

1. Clone the repository or extract the plugin.
2. Run npm install to install build dependencies.
3. Run npm run build to compile the block scripts.

Other JavaScript files in assets/js/public/ and assets/js/admin/ are hand-written and shipped unminified.

External Services

This plugin optionally integrates with Google reCAPTCHA to protect the prayer request submission form from spam and automated submissions. This integration is entirely optional and disabled by default. It can be enabled and configured under Settings → reCAPTCHA.

What data is sent and when:
When reCAPTCHA is enabled, the visitor’s browser loads the reCAPTCHA script from Google’s servers when the prayer form page is viewed. On form submission, a reCAPTCHA token is sent from the visitor’s browser to Google’s verification API (https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/siteverify) to validate the submission. No prayer request data is sent to Google — only the reCAPTCHA response token and your site’s secret key.

Service provider:
Google reCAPTCHA is provided by Google LLC.
– Terms of Service: https://policies.google.com/terms
– Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy
– reCAPTCHA Terms: https://cloud.google.com/recaptcha/docs/faq

If reCAPTCHA is not configured or disabled in the plugin settings, no connection to Google’s servers is made.