Glass Beads: Notifications That Don’t Annoy

WordPress admin notices are chaos. Every plugin dumps its own notices at the top of every page, update nags, license warnings, review requests, ads. Glass Beads replaces all of that with a quiet, purposeful notification system.

Toast Notifications

Transient events, “invoice paid”, “ticket updated”, “backup completed”, appear as toast notifications that slide in from the top-right corner and auto-dismiss after a few seconds. Each toast has a category colour (green for success, amber for warning, red for error) and a left border accent. They stack vertically and dismiss in order.

Persistent Badges

Sidebar app icons can show badge counts, the number of overdue invoices, unread messages, pending approvals. Badges are persistent until the underlying condition is resolved. They use the Glass badge API: any plugin can call glass_set_badge() with an app ID and count.

Notification Centre

The bell icon in the Glass header opens the notification centre, a slide-out panel showing recent events grouped by type. Notifications persist until dismissed, unlike toasts which auto-dismiss. The centre pulls from a unified notification log that all AJT plugins write to.

The key design principle: notifications should inform, not interrupt. Toasts are for “this just happened”. Badges are for “this needs attention”. The notification centre is for “here’s what you missed”. Three patterns, three use cases, zero chaos.