A (good) update on Turbo Admin

Posted on by Ross Wintle

I’m still at work on Turbo Admin. I’ve had a bit of a break to do some other things. Here’s what’s coming up!

Hello WordPress world.

You are owed an update on my Turbo Admin browser extension!

What’s happening now?

I just want to make it clear that I am still working on it. I have limited spare time, and tend to only work on one little side project at a time.

At the start of this year I was working hard on Turbo Admin – I have two big new features/integrations that are nearly done:

  • Plugin installation from the WordPress repository
  • User switching integration

They are so nearly ready – I’m using a beta version with them in myself. But I’m making sure that they are robust and work across lots of different configurations, including multisite and respecting user permissions, and that’s actually been quite tricky (Remember this is a browser extension!! I don’t have back-end access. So some of this is actually some simple, but crafty tricks that make you think that I do!)

There’s also been some good fixes, such as:

  • Faster and improved search of installed plugins
  • More test/dev/staging domains for the dev/staging site notices feature.

For the last couple of months, my work on Turbo Admin has been stalled as I work on some other things. Mostly this is not notable things, but my WordSesh talk was a particular highlight and consumed at least a couple of weeks.

But I’ll be back on it very soon and I’ll try to polish this current release so you can get the new features as soon as possible,

What’s happening next?

The next major things on my list are:

  • Making Turbo Admin work with non-standard admin URLs.
  • Improving accessibility
  • Some cleaning and tidying of some minor things that have gone a bit wonky with recent WordPress releases. It’s fine on them, but some things have moved around that shouldn’t have.

And the next big idea?

For ages, since the very start of Turbo Admin, I have wondered if there is a way to create some kind of standard for plugins to reveal their own commands and searches to Turbo Admin – but also to any other menu-type user interface that might want to consume them.

Here’s what I wrote back in 2022:

I know nothing, really, but could nav menus be a browser API?

It is SO interesting that, three years later, things like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and the quietly-launched WordPress Feature API (why is this in an Automattic GitHub repository? 🧐) are coming about.

But I think both of these are to some extent over-complicated for this use case.

For sure, I think the Feature API could be a part of a command-palette API. But I also think that the navigation and search aspects of such an API could be a lot simpler.

This is something I’ll be thinking about. Perhaps I’ll have a basic version of something in place soon that will make Turbo Admin extendable, or be usable by other navigation and search “clients”.

We’ll see. I’m probably not the best person to do this, but perhaps I can put forward an initial idea that can be iterated on.

And if nothing else, I’ve had thoughts for a Turbo Admin client-side plugin that would enable new things, and this might be the API that that uses to talk to Turbo Admin’s extension.

For now, know that Turbo Admin is not forgotten. I’ll see if I can get that exciting new release out soon!