Gust Plugin Adds Support for Categories, Featured Images and Custom Post Types

The Gust plugin aims to provide a Ghost-style publishing experience within the WordPress admin. It was released at the end of last year by developer Arūnas Liuiza. He was disappointed that Ghost didn’t end up being a fork of WordPress, so he decided to package its best publishing features into a plugin. Gust adds a Ghost-style editor with a live preview pane to WordPress and includes support for Markdown.

Liuiza has been gradually improving the plugin and the 0.4.0 release is a total rewrite with several new features since the last time we featured it on the Tavern. It’s now PHP 5.2 compatible. In addition to media upload capabilities, Gust now supports adding and assigning a featured image.

The latest version includes the ability to create and add categories in addition to tags.

Gust 0.4.0 adds autosave support so you don’t have to worry about saving your drafts as you are composing. This release includes support for custom fields (post meta) and adds experimental support for custom post types. You can enable that feature via the plugin’s settings page.

In the past, the Gust dashboard was difficult to find unless you knew how to navigate there. The latest release improves the discoverability of the Gust dashboard by adding tighter integration with the WordPress admin bar and post edit links.

You can easily edit any of your content in the Gust dashboard by clicking on the new link in the hover menu below posts/pages/CPTs.

Gust is by no means a perfect of full-featured editing experience, but it is a solid option for adding Markdown support with a live preview. Not every user likes the same flavor of WordPress and Gust adds an interesting alternative to the current publishing experience. In the future, we may see many more variations of the WordPress editor as the platform adds better support for interfacing with external apps.

If you like where the plugin is headed and want to help contribute, you can find Gust on GitHub. So far, it has received excellent ratings on WordPress.org and Liuiza has been adding regular improvements. You can download Gust for free via the plugin installer in the WordPress admin.