Feedback & Suggestion for Admin Interface

Hi Niackery,

Thank you for your feedback and suggestions!
I really love the ideas you have put forward! Particularly the option to pick some of the standard admin areas.
I created this plugin initially as a way to easily drop custom menu items up there and due to the fact that menus do not change so often, I hadn’t delved into making some admin options built in to drag and drop.

I see this plugin being used for a lot of front-end menu use also, giving admins control over the top bar menu that is built in with WordPress when it comes to delivering a seamless and neat top bar menu option to front-end users, so separating the menus interface in the admin area may not be helpful for everyone.
In saying that, I will work on a few ideas, maybe to have these 3 locations in their own tab in the menus page or something. To make it the best all round experience, I will entertain a few options before implementing.

I will put some thought into all of this and develop some solutions first chance I get. Please be patient here, as I do not get a lot of time to put into these things at the moment.

Thanks again for your constructive and detailed feedback ??

Cheers
Benbodhi

I should also mention that the built in WordPress Menus options can easily be used for front end or admin… I often use role based conditionals in themes to create menu locations based on whether someone is a guest, logged in as a certain role or certain membership level or is an admin… These conditionals are super powerful and give you granular control over what any given user of a site can see in their menus.
The reason it seems logical to keep all menus in one place is because a lot will be very similar, with just slight changes for each user role.

I will definitely experiment with the idea and see if it will work better and try to apply what would be best.

Thanks again for your feedback, you’ve got me thinking!

Hi Benbodhi,

I see what you mean about the usefulness of having everything together for some sites, but I’m glad you see my point that other sites might not really need that front-end stuff in the top bar. So, I think your tabs idea is great — keep everything together, maintain a consistent format, but provide organisational divisions. Nice one!

Thanks very much for considering my suggestions. I’ll submit a 4 rating for now but I’ll definitely come back to change it to a 5 once you’ve had a chance to work something out ??

Cheers ??

I’ll be working on the admin links for sure as soon as I get a chance, hopefully in the next few weeks.

Hi Benbodhi, I’m wondering if you’ve made any progress on this issue? Thanks in advance for the update!

Hello again,

Unfortunately, I have not had a chance to look at this, but have noticed that core dev might be modifying the menus interface, so was hoping to work with the newer changes.
I’ve had a super busy few months, but should get a chance to look at it soon.

Hmm, if core changes are coming, then you’re right that it would be best to wait and see what they are. No sense wasting time and effort. Thanks for letting me know about this — I’m excited to see what happens!

Hi Benbodhi,

I hope you’re well. Ever since you added that extra menu location for me, I’ve been using classes to display the menu items based on whether the user is on the front end or in the admin (I don’t display the menu to logged out visitors). I also use classes to display items based on user role, since I’ve got a few people who sign is as subscribers to help me review stuff (actual permissions to access the hidden items are assigned via plugin). Given the complexity of the setup, I would now dislike all the switching around a separate interface would cause. So, I retract my request!! Lol.

However, it would still make things a lot easier to be able to choose from back end menu items instead of having to create custom links. I’m hoping that will be possible with the upcoming changes you mentioned — though I’ll likely be done building the menus by then ??

Cheers!

Hello,

I had a brief look into making admin items as options to add to the menu dynamically… Had aa quick play when I had time and didn’t quite get there.
I will hopefully have time to work on my plugins very soon (I just saw your post about the php warnings too).

Thanks for your patience ??
As this is open source stuff, I haven’t had a lot of time to focus on them lately, gotta get food on the table as they say. But nonetheless, the inspiration is there to do some solid work on them and implement my little list of future features.

Thanks for looking into it. That you “didn’t quite get there” sounds encouraging!

As for your reasons for the delay, there’s no need to mention it. I’m sure most of us are in the same boat ??

I ended up having a good dig today… very close ??
I managed to get the Admin Pages Meta Box in there and can dump all the admin menu/submenu items as an array displayed on screen… and I can add custom items in there that work correctly.
Now I just need to figure out how to populate them dynamically in similar HTML to the standard pages and categories one.
This is one part of WordPress that isn’t so easy to deal with unfortunately.
But there’s an upside – I don’t think anyone has done it…

It could spin off into a slightly different plugin after this update, along with it’s own menu page to control all the standard toolbar menu items and the ability to add a few custom ones too such as a quick delete button (so you can hit it when you are on any page or post type and it is gone to trash from the front end).
I will surely keep you updated.

I’m also working on making it so you can add your own locations dynamically, so it would serve your purpose of having that second menu in the same area ??

That’s great! I love your positive attitude — the upside is that no one’s done it before? Lol! That’s an awesome way to look at it ??

Wow, the extra features you’re working on sound really interesting.

When you say “control all the standard toolbar menu items,” do you mean the ability to remove them instead of having to use remove_menu()? I’m currently using this code in functions.php in addition to this plugin:

function my-prefix_remove_admin_bar_links() {
	global $wp_admin_bar;
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('new-content');
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('search');
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('comments');
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('view-site');
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('dashboard');
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('themes');
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('customize-themes');
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('customize');
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('customize-widgets');
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('widgets');
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('menus');
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('user-info');
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('edit-profile');
}
add_action( 'wp_before_admin_bar_render', 'my-prefix_remove_admin_bar_links' );

Now this puts me completely off track, as I see a similar section in the plugin, but it’s commented out. Did I do that? Could that be what’s causing the error described in the other thread?

Anyway, back to this thread — I think I saw somewhere that the core team is planning on integrating the menu section into the customizer. Is that right? Please correct me if I’m wrong! But if that is indeed the case, it might be essential to have an options page for this plugin…

Thanks for putting so much effort into this!

Hey, sorry for the slow reply!
I’m in Australia, so it’s 8am now ??

Alright… I have tried with huge amounts of menus items in place, not yet with CSS hiding one from front… but that shouldn’t affect PHP.
I will keep trying different things and see if I can reproduce first chance I get.

As for the other menu control, yep ?? that’s the one… Simple checkboxes to turn them on or off… maybe with ajax so it happens without re-loading the page.
And yes, you noticed inside the plugin there is commented out lines… That was me. I intended to start that section a while back, but for public release, I just hid the WP logo and commented out the rest.
It shouldn’t cause any errors having the same code in your theme as mine is commented out. In saying that, you can use the ones in my plugin to clean your theme functions up a bit if you like.

I haven’t been following core for the past 2 months… Also why I was so late to reply to these threads – I got a new computer in Feb and I have a LOT of email accounts, one of which I forgot to setup and it took me that long to notice :O but it was my WP one, all things development related. I’ll be following along more closely again now and see if I can see anything about menus in customizer.

Thanks for helping me put effort into this! It’s cool that people are so into WordPress and supporting the community, so cheers!

No worries at all! Are you from Australia, or just living there for the moment? I spent a month in Queensland back in 2010, it was pretty awesome!

What a relief to know that it wasn’t me who messed with the plugin files — I usually leave myself notes if I do something like that! I mustn’t have thought to check the plugin when I put the code in my functions file…

That’s hilarious about your WP email. Laughed out loud when I read that!

About the customizer… I don’t use it at all. I’m using my own theme based on Underscores and I’m not even loading the customizer. So if it’s true that menus are going into it, I’m not exactly sure what I’ll do. I have an idea that I would build my own front end menus for the site as they’re simple link lists anyway, but for the toolbar, I’m guessing I would have to add my own links, the same way I’ve been removing them from functions.php… When you find out whether I’ve heard correctly or whether I’m just spreading rumours ?? please let me know!