The experimental “command center” is coming to WordPress core. What do I think of it? And what does it mean for my own “command palette” product, Turbo Admin?
The Short Story
- I will continue to sell Turbo Admin, but I want you to buy it knowing that parts or all of it could become obsolete in the future. Possibly quite soon!
- I won’t offer discounts at this point. Mostly because Turbo Admin is (in my opinion) ridiculously good value anyway!
- While there is talk of a new admin design, and I’m sure it will be re-done in React JS, I don’t see the current admin being phased out any time soon. So Turbo Admin will continue to make the admin more useful.
- I will continue to work on Turbo Admin and add new things to it. It’s a passion project, it has a small community of dedicated users who love it, and I’m not abandoning it.
What’s changing in core?
Two things are changing in WordPress core that might affect Turbo Admin.
1. A command centre is being added. Probably.
WordPress is building what they call a “command center” in WordPress. It’s currently:
- experimental
- available in the Gutenberg plugin (read the testing post linked below for instructions)
- only currently available in the site editor screen
- open for testing and feedback.
2. A design refresh is coming. Maybe. Sometime.
There are some early discussions about a design refresh for the WordPress Dashboard.
Given all the use of React components and libraries inside WordPress, I guess I knew this was coming. And a design refresh is long overdue. And much as I hate the idea of it being Reactified, I know that WordPress needs to move on and this is probably the way.
How will these things affect Turbo Admin?
- Adding a command centre will clearly affect Turbo Admin as it will mean that the main function of Turbo Admin is now in WordPress core.
I’m hoping that the core command center can be disabled so that if people prefer Turbo Admin they can still use it! - Re-vamping the dashboard, however, could really affect Turbo Admin more broadly and prevent many of its features from working.
How do I feel about all of this?
On the one hand, I built Turbo Admin because I wanted something like this in core. And now it’s coming to core. So “Yay”. But also, I’m sad that Turbo Admin may now have a limited life.
BUT… I recently spent some time working with some code that modified some things in the dashboard and I was reminded how many hooks into it there are, and how deeply people integrate with it.
I can’t imagine they can write a React-based dashboard that’s fully backwards compatible with all the things that currently integrate with the dashboard.
So I have to believe that there will, for quite a long time, be a “classic dashboard” option. And Turbo Admin will continue to offer a bunch of dashboard improvements as long as that exists.
What’s coming next?
I got distracted by life for a while. But I’m still implementing some new things in Turbo Admin – list table navigation improvements, and I really want to bring back my prototyped “dashboard widget hiding” feature.
No promises on timelines, but there will be a new release and it will do new fun things!
Drop me a line if you have any questions or thoughts!