Back in March I wrote about picking up Turbo Admin development again. And despite a few months passing, I wasn’t kidding!
Product work is hard – you need to do way more than just build the product. And I’m choosing to avoid AI. Some may say that makes me slow. I say I enjoy my craft and I think you get a better product.
The result of chipping away at this for a few months is Turbo Admin v1.21. Which includes some great new features, many improvements and fixes, and is free for all users.
New features
The key new things in this release are:
Playground Support
This was hard (because of nested iframes!!) and it’s incomplete, but Turbo Admin now works in both WordPress Playground and my.wordpress.net, bringing the command palette and all the admin cleanup features to these places. Banishing welcome/onboarding screens from these places is particularly nice.
Menu pinning/hiding
The menu hiding feature has seen several improvements, and now also allows you to pin/favourite items at the top of the admin menu.
Interesting stats! (Private, on-device)
There are planned features – such as frequently used items in the command palette – that will be based on your usage of Turbo Admin. So I have started collecting and storing usage data for commands, sites and command palette use.
I can not stress enough that this is _private_ and _inside your browser only_. The only information I ever collect from you is purchasing and licensing data. I do not collect these stats or send them anywhere, and this is fully transparent in a new website page.
However, as this data now collected, I thought it would also be fun to be able to see it. So there is a simple “Used X times” in the settings pop-up, and a hidden screen (can you find it?) that shows you more.
I had a stupid idea to try to report “mouse miles saved” or something. Perhaps in future.
I don’t plan doing a “Turbo Admin Wrapped” at new year time. Would you want that?
Hide the core command palette hint
Users that are new to keyboard shortcuts and command palettes will certainly appreciate the new command palette hint added to the admin bar of WordPress 7.0. But as a Turbo Admin user, you probably don’t want to see it.
So Turbo Admin adds an option to remove it.
Other updates
There are numerous other improvements and fixes included here too. Hopefully you’ll just have a smoother experience and notice (or not) some little niggles are gone.
A note on tech and AI
I also wrote a page about the tech that I use for Turbo Admin and my use (or lack of use) of AI.
If you’re wondering, I can’t in all honesty claim it’s 100% AI-free because I used Copilot in fancy-autocomplete mode for a while. But I’m not using it now and I don’t use modern coding agents on Turbo Admin.
It’s a highly hand-crafted, slow-brewing codebase. I enjoy making it this way, and I’m proud that it’s my work! Perhaps that means it’s developed slowly. But that’s a trade-off I’m more than happy to make.
It’s also kinda sad that I have to say this – that I feel the need to reassure you about it. But that’s where we are.
Things I didn’t do… yet!
The scope of this kept growing and shrinking. I reached a point where I wanted the features for myself, so I drew a line and got a release out.
In fact, the things I didn’t do aren’t related to the features of the product.
What to do about Lemon Squeezy?
I use Lemon Squeezy for sales and licensing. It was exactly what I needed when I started out but they got bought by Stripe and – I’m sorry to say – it’s really gone off the rails. Their support just doesn’t get back to you these days, which is really bad for an ecommerce and merchant of record service that you depend on for business.
I guess at some point I will have to move the sales and licensing to somewhere else. But they also had a built-in CRM and email marketing feature which I wanted to use. I suppose I won’t be using that either, so…
Mailing list
I have set up a mailing list on MailerLite, but I need to get people on to it. Most of my announcements used to happen on Twitter, but I’m not there now. I want to be able to notify people of new releases. And I also want to seek feedback on what’s next, as the future of Turbo Admin is kinda uncertain given the direction of the WP dashboard.
I care about privacy though, so to get this set up I need to be careful with CAPTCHA’s on forms, and need a privacy policy and… it was all too much and would have held up the release.
This will come though as I want to engage with my customers.
Enjoy v1.21!
I hope you enjoy the new features of this version. I had fun making it and I’m looking forward to using it myself.
Do drop me a line – [email protected] – if you have questions, want to give feedback, or are just happy with Turbo Admin still! It’s always nice to hear from my users.