Kimb Jones

Founder at Make Do. We help teams stabilise, improve and support complex WordPress websites and connected systems

Bring the Ghost blogging experience to WordPress with the Gust plugin

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I’ve recently had the pleasure of testing out a new plugin that brings the writing experience of the new Ghost blogging platform into WordPress.

Gust screenshot

Note: at the time of writing this Gust had a bug which made it fail on most hosting platforms. If you experience issues you can apply a quick change to the source code – see thread on GitHub.

More a port than a plugin

Gust is not just a simple WordPress Dashboard re-skin. It’s a full port of the Ghost UI which has been developed to interact with the WordPress API. This is actually pretty impressive because:

  • It won’t break your dashboard
  • It’s in a separate location to /wp-admin
  • Once activated you can ignore the standard WordPress dashboard entirely
  • WordPress Dashboard updates/re-designs/iterations won’t break it

Once active the writing experience in Gust is identical to using Ghost, in fact it’s quite eerie (excuse the pun) using Ghost in this fashion when you realise that this implementation is technically closer to what John O’Nolan initially proposed as a “WordPress-lite fork” in his initial announcement that launched the Ghost project.

Not ready for mainstream

There are a few bugs and issues with Gust at the moment, see GitHub for info. This is understandable considering the plugin is only a few weeks old and the actual Ghost source code which it is running is also pretty new too. So I wouldn’t recommend it for mainstream use just yet, but give it time.

Clarity Dashboard update

I’d be a fool not to mention the WordPress Clarity Dashboard project at this point. Clarity Dashboard is the “more friendly and accessible WordPress dashboard” plugin project that I announced at my talk during WordCamp UK earlier in 2013.

Gust actually uses the exact same concept that Matt and I came up with to develop Clarity Dashboard but we’ve been too hunkered down with client work to release anything. It’s great to see Gust using the same basic principles that we came up with for Clarity Dashboard and validates a lot of what we’ve been working on.

If anything Gust has given me a new drive to move forward with the development of Clarity Dashboard so expect expect an update early in 2014.

I’m running a theme workshop at WordCamp London

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My profile for WordCamp London 2013

My profile for WordCamp London 2013

Going to WordCamp London? Check out my WordPress Theme Fundamentals workshop at 9:30am on Saturday 23rd November.

Who is this workshop for?

I’ve designed this workshop for complete newbies and theme hackers. Maybe you’ve looked into theme building and been overwhelmed by the number of tutorials online, or you opened TwentyWhatever and saw 30+ PHP files and decided it was just too much?

This workshop will give anyone who attends a quick fire introduction to how to make WordPress themes from scratch. We’ll also be building a very basic ‘page driven’ CMS theme (just pages, no posts/comments etc…).

Sign up

You can sign up here for the workshop, but please bear in mind that you’ll miss the first half of the day’s conference talks.

More info can be found on the WordCamp London site and if you have questions just drop me an email.