Goliath: Alternative Wordpress Dashboard

I love Wordpress. We all love WordPress.

With that being said I would like to declare that I love the idea of WordPress. I love its community. Its far reaching presence and the ease with which one can start working with it. However, I hate, better said, I despise, WordPress’s Administration interface. I absolutely hate it! The clutter, the tacky menus and the pain to work with it in mobile. Phew! The wordpress Admin Interface is such that by the time one reaches its editor to start writing, a large part of the desire to write will have vanished. And this is what gnaws at me.

I also build websites with WordPress, many of which required users with absolutely no knowledge of computers, let alone of WordPress, it becomes a pain in the ass to show them every time where to go and how to get started with the writing and content contributing process. Many a times and many a solutions(plugins) I have tried to make sense of then problem but all existing solutions took me on a fair ride and brought me to the same place as before.

Although WordPress and its team (awesome team!) did do a good job in revamping and beautifying the interface in its newer versions, but for me that just wasn’t enough. All I wanted was a simpler Admin Interface for WordPress, the likes of Svbtle, Medium and Roon.io, that will for just once let me focus on the writing, the content.

Frustrated and charged with a mission, I set forth to build which I now introduce to you:

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Goliath

Alternative WordPress Dashboard

Ba Dum Tss

Goliath is an alternative Admin Interface for WordPress that focusses on design and aesthetics. Goliath was inspired by Svbtle and Medium, both of which have excellently designed editor and Administrative interfaces. Goliath was built with the objective to bring the Distraction Free environment of the aforementioned blogging platforms to WordPress.

Goliath is simple. Clear consise buttons and other indicators clearly describe what goes where. The aim is to let the writer focus on writing and hold the other items for another time.

Have a look:

Dashboard:

Editor:

Editor menu in action:

Like it? Then let me tell you how to set it up:

1. Download the files from here: https://github.com/arkokoley/goliath/archive/master.zip.
2. Unzip the files to a folder. Name it “dash”.
3. Upload “dash” to your WordPress root.
4. Profit! :D

So What is Goliath?

Goliath is nothing but a bunch of PHP, CSS and Javascript files slapped together with some magic glue.

Goliath borrows heavlily from Svbtle’s design. While the editor, based on Pen by Sofish, is basically copied from Medium.

What Else?

Less Distractions. More Writing. As you can see, Golaith is in bare minimums with no distractions. No SEO settings, no category selection, no Tag selections. Just writing. Goliath encourages you to write first and later optimize as required for SEO or whatnot.

Less Options. Unlike the default WordPress Admin Interface, Goliath has no metadata sections. It consists of just the Post title and its content. Any metadata additions have to be done in the WordPress default interface, When you are not writing.

Markdown Support. Yeah this is for those supergeeks (like me) who like to write in Markdown (A text formatting syntax developed by John Gruber). Goliath support Markdown out of the box. However, he can only read Markdown, not write it. Meaning, posts can be written in Markdown and they will be parsed to HTML on the go, with the final result being stored as HTML. So you can write in Markdown and not have to install any plugin too. Capital!

What Next?

I plan to keep adding features to and extending Goliath. I look forward to working with plugin makers who would like to have Goliath support for their fruits of labour. Hopefully in near future, Goliath will surely be an actual alterntive to the default interface not just in terms of fashion but function too.

FAQ

Wait, Who the hell are you? My name is Gaurav Koley. I’m a 17 year old student. I have been blogging since 2009 and creating websites since then using mostly WordPress and Jekyll/Docpad. I started an edu-site NXTClass and a Blog based on poetry: Poets Are Us, since I’m poet myself. I also built a Jekyll Blog Framwork called Sani.

Wait, didn’t [someone] do it before? You stole the idea from them! Well, the WP-Svbtle team did do something exactly like this but they have long stopped working on it. And I’m going to do it anyway because I built Goliath to suit my needs and it does that.

Sounds Cool. Where do I get it? Its available on Github. Poets Are Us uses Goliath for its poets. Its still a rather unfinished product, but I’d love help from people who would like to see this work. If you are interested in getting involved, let’s chat. I’m at @arkokoley and arkokoley@live.in.

I hate it/ hate you/ hate everything. Point duly noted. But then haters gonna hate.