Tagloom / Fulfilment · Pre-release
The label printer is on the bench.
The driver is the problem.
Design product labels on a canvas, bind them to your WooCommerce data, and send them straight to a Bluetooth thermal printer. The printing path is built; physical printer verification comes next, before release.
- Permanently, with no licence
- FreePermanently, with no licence
- External requests, anywhere in the plugin
- 0External requests, anywhere in the plugin
- Steps of undo in the designer
- 50Steps of undo in the designer
- Free and open source
- GPLFree and open source
Why Tagloom
The hard part is not the label.
It is everything between you and the printer.
A thermal label is a small bitmap. What makes printing one from WooCommerce miserable is the driver, the PDF, the print dialog, the desktop agent, the subscription — and a design step that is a form.
The browser is the driver
Web Bluetooth talks to the printer from wp-admin. There is no driver to install, no PDF to open, no print dialog to fight and no cloud print service to pay for. Label data and print history use requests to your own WordPress site. The prepared bitmap travels directly from your browser to the printer over Bluetooth.
A canvas, not a form
Tagloom gives you an artboard with millimetre rulers, snapping, alignment and fifty steps of undo — and every property is also a number you can type, so a layout can be exact.
Bound to your real data
A text element binds to a product's name, SKU, price, brand or any custom field, and the picker lists the value each field currently resolves to rather than a token name. You preview against real products from your own catalogue — including the longest name and the one with no SKU — before anything prints.
Deliberately narrow
Labels that go on the goods: product name, batch code, SKU, price, barcode. Not parcels. Carrier postage, rates, manifests and tracking are a carrier-integration product and are permanently out of scope.
What is built today
Core workflows built. Hardware testing ahead.
Every capability below is implemented and covered by tests in the plugin as it stands. Physical printer verification comes next; no model is claimed as verified until it passes.
Canvas designer with real undo
Drag text, boxes, lines, images and barcodes onto a millimetre artboard. Elements snap to the label's safe area and to each other, a multi-selection aligns and distributes, and fifty steps of undo cover bindings and multi-select too. It autosaves, so there is no save button.
Binding where the field appears
Type a slash in a text element and pick a field from a list showing what it currently resolves to. Bindings are chips inside the text, mixed with literal words.
A preview that tells the truth
Thermal printing is one bit per dot, and a designer showing smooth anti-aliased type is lying about the result. Press P for the actual 1-bit output — produced by the same module that builds the bitmap sent to the printer, not a second renderer that will drift from it.
Barcodes quantised to whole dots
Code 128 and EAN-13, drawn at device resolution with module width rounded to a whole number of printer dots and no anti-aliasing. A barcode that will not fit is refused with the two measurements, never squeezed — bars straddling dot boundaries scan on the bench and fail in the field, which is worse than not scanning at all.
Print from an order, or from many
A metabox on the order screen, and a bulk action on the Orders list. Runs are a list of rows, and a row counts as printed only once the printer confirms the page finished — so a run that dies at row 7 of 12 resumes at row 8 rather than reprinting seven labels.
A record of what was printed
Tagloom stamps the values it printed onto the order item, so an order keeps a permanent note of which batch each unit was filled from. A shop's batch code lives on the product and changes with the bottle — so that record cannot be reconstructed later, and uninstalling Tagloom deliberately leaves it behind.
Reads the printer, does not ask you
On connecting, Tagloom reads the device's real specification — resolution, print direction, printhead width and density range — from the open-source niimbluelib model table rather than making you pick from a dropdown. A printer it does not recognise refuses to print and shows an id to report, instead of guessing at a resolution.
Printing is not an admin permission
The person printing labels is a packer, not an administrator. Printing needs the shop-order editing capability, product tags need the product one, and only the settings screen needs full administrator rights — so a warehouse can print without being handed the keys to the site.
How it works
Connect, design, print
Written in the present tense because this is how the code works. Verifying it on a physical printer is the next step before release.
- 01
Open Tagloom in Chrome or Edge, over HTTPS
This is not a preference. Talking to a Bluetooth device from a web page needs Web Bluetooth, which only Chromium-based browsers implement and which browsers expose only on a secure page. Tagloom detects both cases specifically and says which one is the problem.
- 02
Select the loaded roll and print a test label
Create a template with your measured stock width, roll pitch, gap and sensor mode. Connect the printer, then select that template under Loaded roll on the Printer screen. The test label uses that roll's geometry and saved offset so you can inspect feed, dot placement and density. With no template selected, it uses the printer's default size instead.
- 03
Design against a real product
Lay the label out on the canvas, bind the fields you want, and cycle through real products from your catalogue with the bracket keys. Label design's hardest problem is surviving data you have not seen — a five-character name and a forty-character one share a template — and watching it reflow is the only way to find that before the stock is spent.
- 04
Print from the order that needs it
Print one label from an order, or select a day's orders and print the lot. What each label said is recorded against the order item, and a run retains confirmed progress. If the printer cannot confirm what finished, printing pauses for you to inspect the stock before starting again.
Build status
Built and tested. Hardware verification next.
This section is not a roadmap teaser. It is the list you would want if you were deciding whether to depend on this.
Tagloom is not released yet — there is no download. The transport, designer, binding, barcodes, print surfaces and journal are implemented and covered by software tests, as are roll-specific calibration, printer-head preview and guarded print recovery. Release follows physical verification: readable output, feed accuracy, interruption recovery and barcode scanning on a real printer. No model has completed that checklist yet.
Built and covered by tests
- Web Bluetooth transport, and the 76-model capability table it reads specifications from
- The 1-bit render path: supersampled, area-averaged and thresholded in our own code
- Canvas designer — snapping, alignment, distribution, fifty-step undo, autosave
- On-canvas data binding, with a picker showing real resolved values
- Live sample records from your own catalogue, cycled with a keystroke
- Code 128 and EAN-13, quantised to whole printer dots and refused rather than squeezed
- Print from a single order, and in bulk from the Orders list
- 38 printer error codes in seven classes, with run recovery that never reprints a confirmed row
- A print journal, and a traceability stamp kept on the order item
- Fully translatable, including the designer, with a translation template
Not verified, or not built
- Completed printer verification: readable labels, accurate two-label advance, interruption recovery and barcode scanning on each model claimed as verified
- Any verified printer model. Presence in the capability table is not a test, so the plugin lists nothing as verified
- A scan test. The barcodes are encoded to the published standards; no scanner has read one
- Third-party label stock, tested. Some models authenticate consumables over RFID and refuse non-vendor rolls
- A public release: no WordPress.org listing and no download
Why there is no price here
There is no pricing section on this page, and unlike the other metered plugins on this shelf that is not because the numbers are still being calibrated — it is because there are none. Tagloom is free permanently: no licence key, no plan, no quota, no account, and no hosted printing service. The reasoning is structural rather than generous. Every other plugin here has a marginal cost per unit of work, because a translation or a generated description is a provider call we pay for. Printing a label costs us nothing — the work happens in your browser, against hardware you own — so there is nothing to meter, and a licence check would only add a way for the packing bench to break. Tagloom is the front door to the shelf, and the honest version of that is a tool that is simply free.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Tagloom is a WordPress plugin that prints product and order labels from wp-admin directly to a Bluetooth thermal label printer, with a canvas designer for laying the label out. The browser talks to the printer, so there is no driver, no PDF, no print dialog and no cloud print service. It is pre-release: the core workflows and roll-specific calibration are implemented, and no physical printer has been verified with it.
Not yet. There is no download and no WordPress.org listing. The designer, the printing path, barcodes and the order surfaces are all built, and it passes WordPress.org's own Plugin Check with no errors. It ships once it has been verified on a physical printer.
Nothing, permanently. No licence key, no plan, no quota, no account. Every other plugin on this shelf meters something because a translation or a generated description is a provider call that costs money per unit of work. Printing a label costs nothing — it happens in your browser against hardware you own — so there is nothing to meter. A licence check would add no value and one more way for a packing bench to stop working.
No model is verified yet. Tagloom reads its printer specifications from the open-source niimbluelib project, which describes 76 NIIMBOT models — but being in that table is not the same as being tested, and no model has physically printed. The plugin marks a printer 'verified' only after a real device has produced a correct label, and lists everything else as 'should work — untested'. Nothing is verified in the current build.
Tagloom uses Web Bluetooth and supports desktop Chrome or Edge over HTTPS. Safari and Firefox are not supported. The plugin checks browser support and whether the page is secure before you connect a printer.
No. Tagloom does not support iPhone or iPad. Use desktop Chrome or Edge over HTTPS; the plugin checks for Web Bluetooth before offering a printer connection.
No, and it is not going to. Tagloom prints what goes on the goods — product name, batch or lot code, SKU, price, barcode. Carrier postage, rates, manifests and tracking are a carrier-integration product with a completely different shape, and they are permanently out of scope.
No cloud printing service is involved. Tagloom uses requests to your own WordPress site to load products, resolve label data, save templates and record print history. Prepared labels go directly from your browser to the printer over Bluetooth. Fonts and printing libraries ship with the plugin. An internet connection to your site is still needed for the complete workflow.
It depends on the printer, and we would rather say so before you buy one. Some NIIMBOT models authenticate their label stock over RFID and refuse to print on non-vendor rolls. That is the manufacturer's own restriction on their own hardware — Tagloom reports it clearly and will not work around it or suggest anyone should.
WooCommerce, WordPress 6.5 or later, PHP 8.1 or later, and desktop Chrome or Edge served over HTTPS. WooCommerce is a hard dependency and the only one — every field Tagloom binds to is a product or an order — and Tagloom does not require or integrate with any other WP Shelf plugin.
Not released yet.
Tagloom is being built in the open on the same platform as Gloty, SnippetGrove and Crawlune. It will be free permanently — no licence, no account, no quota — and release requires verified output, feed accuracy, recovery and barcode scanning on real hardware. No model has completed that checklist yet.