Assistant Pro

Assistant Takes First Place in WordPress OC’s Plugin-a-Palooza Competition

Robby McCullough - May 7, 2019

Beaver Builder is a completely distributed team. We’re currently at 16 members that are based all over the world. We’re big fans of WordCamps (regional WordPress conferences) because they give our team a chance to get together and bond face-to-face.

Over the weekend, several of us attended WordCamp Orange County and we entered our new plugin, Assistant, in the annual Plugin-a-Palooza competition.

Assistant Wins Plugin-a-Palooza

We’re proud to say our team brought home first place! Congrats to everyone that placed and participated. I hope y’all had as much fun as we did! We’re planning to put the prize money back into the community through WordCamp sponsorships.

We’ve spent the last few years working in the Page Builder space. We’re in a unique position in that our users span the whole spectrum of web and WordPress experience. Beaver Builders consists of first-time users all the way up to teams that create enterprise-level web applications on WordPress.

Beginners and Pros Struggle with the WordPress Admin Area

One common problem we see over and over, regardless of anyone’s level of experience, is frustration with the WordPress admin area. Beginners find it confusing and overwhelming. Experts tend to find it clunky and slow. Everyone seems to struggle with the disconnect between the fun part of one’s website, the frontend, and the admin area.

We set out to solve this problem with Assistant. Assistant is a collection of everyday productivity apps that live on the frontend of your WordPress. It’s a new way to work with WordPress.

With Assistant, you can quickly navigate and tweak your site’s pages, posts, and media. You can manage users, and comments. You can update plugins and upload and manage media in your media library. Assistant features a notification center and enables you to quickly grab links to your site’s content. Assistant is for everybody because it brings the daily chores of WordPress management to the frontend.

Assistant is a collection of everyday productivity apps that live on the frontend of your WordPress. https://beaver.builders/assistant Click To Tweet

Assistant is still in the pre-release stages of development. As it is today, it’s just a sliver of the vision we have for it. Assistant is not meant to mirror or replace the WordPress admin area. It is a platform where we can build the next generation of WordPress tools. Tools for collaboration. Tools for sharing. Tools for building applications and eCommerce solutions. Tools for the humans that use WordPress.

You can download Assistant today from the WordPress repo. We’re actively seeking out user feedback and reviews. Please don’t hesitate to let us know what you think via Github, Twitter, Facebook, or a WordPress.org review.

4 Comments

David McCan on May 13, 2019 at 6:19 am

Congrats. Another bit of idea confirmation.
andrew peters on May 14, 2019 at 8:24 am

This is pretty neat.

Is there a way (or tutorials) to create apps for this yet? I’d love to add like a MetaBox settings page or something like that?
- Robby McCullough on May 23, 2019 at 10:20 am
  
  We will have an API for creating apps soon, but we likely won’t publish any formal documentation until we get to a 1.0 release. Everything is changing too quickly.
Andrew on August 5, 2019 at 6:44 pm

Is there a roadmap for this? I noticed in the repository that there hasn’t been any updates in four-ish months.