I love WordPress, it's powerful and versatile. But I think its biggest flaw is cosmetic: the dashboard overwhelms casual users because it doesn't prioritize the features people actually use.

Even recent updates have improved things under the hood without fixing the layout itself.

So for this plugin, I redesigned the layout inspired by platforms like Medium and Substack, around what I believe people use 90% of the time.

Posting-related actions are front and center; everything else is secondary. Inside the editor itself, the same logic applies: category, featured image, and content are what you see first. It's entirely cosmetic, you can switch back and forth between dashboard with a click.

I would imagine some of my choices here are controversial, and I welcome other people's take. But I believe we need to be more opinioned about what shows up where in the WordPress dashboard, and that's the main point I wanted to make here.

Here's the github link if you want to take a look, play around, or improve on it. (I had to add Promo to my post title but I am not actually promoting anything paid, just to be clear)

As always, I went through the first 8 freshly featured plugins from WordPress.org of August. Here are my 2 cents.

Meow Mailer (4.9/5)

SMTP plugin and mail logger, does exactly what it says.
I liked the background send option, failure alerts, and being able to resend an email straight from the log.
The dashboard button naming is a bit confusing, and plain text emails have no line breaks in the log. Other than that, another great plugin from Meow.

DineKit (4.8/5)

Restaurant menu, online ordering, table reservations, and POS all in one plugin.
Packed with many great features, nice on-boarding, and the QR code generator and menu builder left a good impression.
Autosave got a little annoying for me personally, and it's 100% free with no pro version in sight, which honestly makes me a bit nervous about how long it'll get maintained.

ITBoffins Live Opening Hours Banner & Table (4.6/5)

Shows you the opening hours on the site.
Simple, intuitive, and the live preview while you set it up is a nice.
No styling options at all, and it could display the time of the WordPress to avoid confusion when you are dealing with different timezones
All in all, simple and solid.

RobArt Text Collector (4.5/5)

Let's you collect, organize, and reuse text snippets on your site.
Easy to use, and works in the front- and backend activate it, and I was surprised to see the AI co-authorship disclosure, you don't see that often.
The dashboard is way too busy though, tons of over-explanation, and you can't edit folders directly from the menu in the backend.
For me personally, not very useful, since I do not often reuse text, but for some people, this can be great.

FrontEdit (4.3/5)

Live frontend editor for WordPress.
The edit and preview toggle is nice and the commenting function is a cool touch.
The Free version's menu is basically useless since almost everything is locked behind pro.
After two disappointing attempts from last month, it was nice to see, that it can be done right, although I still do not see the appeal.

ShareMyPost (4.0/5)

Adds social share buttons to your posts and pages.
Just works out of the box, icons are easy to reorganize, and the developer support with filters and actions is great.
Can't customize the width of the container, and contrast on some icons like Tumblr and Snapchat is really bad. You can add the icons before or after the content. I think it is nicer to have the option to place those freely with a block, therefore, I'll pass.

LC Lightbox Lite (3.6/5)

A lightweight lightbox plugin for your images.
Animations are snappy and it's easy to use.
A bunch of options just don't work, like gradients and text display, and it feels pretty unpolished overall.There are way better options and in its current state, it is not a good advertisement for the Gallery Plugin it suppose to promote.

Direct Invoices (3.1/5)

Invoicing and payment requests built for WordPress.
Nice on-boarding and WooCommerce isn't required.
Missing a city field, dates don't save properly, and it feels most likely AI generated and under tested. Good concept, but it needs more work.

See the full breakdown with screen recordings on YT:
https://youtu.be/Ljw5-cWYIt0?si=4zPN02199zjQJomO

What do you think about this selection? Will you install any of those?

Hey, I’ve been building on WordPress since 2006, professionally since 2011. 6 years running my own (profitable) theme and plugin shop, four years as a vetted contractor, and a few as as a senior engineer at an agencies in US & Europe. I’ve worked with hundreds of corporate clients over that time, mostly ecommerce, NGOs, government and SMEs, which is where I specialise. Several plugins on wp.org, around ten themes (most now outdated), and I contribute to core.
2022-2024 I had multiple contracts running at once, earning roughly what an L5 to L6 engineer at a big tech company makes. I was turning work away, with extremely happy clients.
I’ve been looking for 8 months. Somewhere north of 100 applications sent, 2 responses.
I’m not posting to complain and I’m aware these posts usually have an obvious answer the poster can’t see. I’d like to know if others are seeing the same thing.
Three observations:

Remote mostly isn’t. I’m in Nairobi. Most postings say “Remote” and mean “remote inside the US,” and many don’t say so they just ignore you, I’ve had not more than 10 responses, mostly automated.

The mid-market thinned out. Plenty at the top and plenty of fixed-price template work at the bottom, increasingly with AI-generated listings. Agencies hiring salaried senior engineers feels much smaller than three years ago.

It isn’t only WordPress. I also work with startups using Next.js and Laravel, and it’s the same story there. So I don’t think this is a WordPress problem, or at least not only one. Something has changed in how companies hire developers generally, and I can’t tell what.

For what it’s worth, I still have hope for WordPress. It has paid my bills for over a decade, it’s still the best CMS for the clients I serve, and I’m not leaving until the last lights are off. I’d just like to know whether anyone is still hiring people to build on it properly.

Happy to hear it if I’m doing something obviously wrong.