V4.0 Dashboard needs organising

The new 4.0 Dashboard is overwhelming and includes many things. There’s members and revenue embed and then there’s a wall of blog posts by Ghost that you have to see every time you check the dashboard.

Please consider decluttering the dashboard by removing the ghost’s blog posts section.

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I would not say that the dashboard is “messy and clumsy” at all.

But, yes, there are here some links that are irrelevant. For instance, though I think The Browser is a cool website, I don’t think the dashboard is a good place to put some ad about it…

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Agreed, the dashboard (along with the heavy push towards subscriptions) in v4 are redundant to many of us, especially those who moved from WordPress seeking less clutter. It was even one of the stated goals of the original Ghost proiect. The “Members (0)” especially grates.

I appreciate that the Ghost developers want to empower individual writers. That should be encouraged! But it shouldn’t detract from the usability of the portal for everyone else. Right now, it does, and it needs a way to be easily disabled for those without technical experience.

(For Ghost blogs I host for other people, I have a Varnish rule that redirects the Dashboard to the Posts page).

@rubenerd How did you sent up the redirect? Through the content/data/redirects.json file?

IIRC, that file doesn’t get processed for the admin interface. I use Varnish to cache Ghost, so I wrote a rule to rewrite/redirect the URL.

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Bad feedback on our end with regards Dashboard profiling. Goes against minimalist design structure emanated from versions prior to v4.0-
Silverwren.

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Yeah you’re right. Need to get rid of irrelevant links.

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One solution for this would be, to allow the user to dismiss/close the posts on dashboard after seeing it once. (like wordpress dashboard does with plugin notices/notifications)

IMO – a Dashboard should be user-configurable.

My preference would be:

Minimally – user can COLLAPSE individual blocks.

Ideally – user can also:

  • HIDE individual blocks

  • Drag-and-Drop blocks to re-arrange

  • Re-Order Custom Views

Best – user can also:

  • Create Custom Blocks
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The minimal option makes sense to me, those collapsed blocks then automatically re-opened when new content/blocks appear.

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I think this thread is treading a lot of the same ground that @kasumin raised in theirs.

For those who haven’t seen, @John responded saying we can use alternative themes, and that personal blogs etc aren’t the best use case for Ghost. It’s dissapointing to me given the original purpose was “Just a Blogging Platform”, but it helped to clarify Ghost’s official position.

If enough of us voice concerns this might change, but for now we might need to collect resources about how to make a “Ghost-lite” that disables/blocks/hides these features.

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This thread isn’t similar actually. I think Ghost has adapted well and served what is making money for creators today. Yes they started with simple blogging but it is natural for a company to pivot, upgrade and enhance their features to serve what the market wants. And growing user revenues from subscriptions are a testament to that. But yes, I think simple bloggers should have some option to disable the members feature. :slight_smile:

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@rubenerd It sounds like you didn’t take the time to research the original purpose you’re referring to. The “just” in “Just a blogging platform” has always referred to a exclusivity of focus on a particular usecase, not a reductive version of “simple and will never change” that you’re implying.

It was a play on the criticism WordPress always refuted, that it was not just a blogging platform, and could do many other things - like build a job board, or a real estate website, or a social network, [and so on]

We haven’t changed direction. If we could have built the dashboard and memberships in 2013, we would have, but unfortunately it took us 8 years :wink:

In that 8 years, the most consistent user feedback we’ve had is that people are looking to grow an audience and build a business, which is what memberships addresses. There are far, far more people who are actively looking for this functionality than those complaining about not wanting it.

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Appreciate it, thanks John. I’m fully on board with your mission here!

But I’m still not sure why this precludes you from having a checkbox to disable memberships it if people don’t need it, just as you did before. It’s been asked by a bunch of us and haven’t got a straight answer, so probably going to leave it now.

The best option would be great, especially if you could embed things such as the plausible analytics widget!

We need an option for removing what we do not want, that’s for sure.

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