Admin menu humility

@ ManxStef – I agree with much of what you said, but I guess since I disagree with the lack of color overall… I’m not as opposed to a few rebels if they are positioned correctly. It still helps me more quickly find what I’m looking for. The custom color option would be GREAT… then they can all follow the latest silly trends and make poor UI decisions and I can override them. ??

We are actually considering removing this (otherwise great) plugin from our sites, just because of the annoying new menu position. The convenience of having all the GA settings in one place just doesn’t compensate the nuisance of having to explain to clients what that new flashy icon is for, and why they should care (apparently) more than, say, pages or comments.
Manually editing every instance of the plugin is out of question of course, since that would disrupt our update workflow.

Please, be considerate, and put the icon back in a more appropriate position.
Thank you

+1 from me too. Please move this menu item down the page or under settings. I would also prefer monochrome for the icon but am more bothered by the positioning.

This is more or less a set and forget plugin. Once it’s set up and working I doubt I will access the settings more than a few times a year. This is one of the things that makes it awesome, but also makes it frustrating that I have to scroll past it several times a day when doing other stuff on the site.

Edit: Thinking about it I suspect this positioning is in preparation for when it supports an analytics dashboard showing Google Analytics data. In this case it might make sense to have this where it is for quick access to analytics. That’s why the Jetpack positioning doesn’t bother me as I access the JetPack stats a lot too.

On the other hand, I have no desire to view GA data in here as I always use the GA web site. A compromise might be to give people the choice in settings, i.e., “Show near top of WP Admin menu? Y/N”

I’m sorry to see that you all disagree with our new position, but we won’t be changing the default setting. As I’ve said to many people on Twitter; if you want to do a pull request for a setting that moves it into settings, we’ll certainly look at it. So far, I’ve seen a lot of complaining, but no-one willing to do a bit of work ??

Hi Yoast

Thanks for the reply, although I’m not sure I’d call it ‘complaining’, personally I would see it as very useful user feedback on an issue that has clearly aroused strong feelings in a lot of people (including at least one lead core developer and some very respected plugin authors).

I will see if I can find some time to work on a pull request.

I am interested to hear if you agree in principle with the general point here, which is that moving the menu option to this location runs the very real risk of many other plugins following suit, so we then end up with a complete self-defeating mess? If you don’t agree, then I’m curious why this plugin and no others ‘deserves’ this special placement?

Cheers
Simon

It deserves the placement because we’re integrating an Analytics dashboard and it makes sense to put those right there as both from a user perspective and historically that’s the logical place. Not really willing to discuss it much further, I know lots of developers aren’t going to agree.

(I do agree on the icon though, we’re looking what we can do about that)

Please consider merging this pull request to add a filter to move the menu item to the bottom of the menu.
https://github.com/Yoast/google-analytics-for-wordpress/pull/87

Just merged it, thx for the pull Anton.

As I’ve said to many people on Twitter; if you want to do a pull request for a setting that moves it into settings, we’ll certainly look at it. So far, I’ve seen a lot of complaining, but no-one willing to do a bit of work ??

I’m sure if someone did this for free the work would end up in the paid version of this plugin!

It might be an incentive to get people to make this change by paying them or your staff ?? Or simply post on here that if somebody did this work (for free) then you’ll be happy to include it in the next update.

I hope that’s exactly what Anton did! :))

Thanks to Anton for the filter and to Yoast for including it in version 5.0.6, along with the improved icon.

For anyone who’s not clear what to do, just add the following line to functions.php and the icon will be moved to the bottom of your admin menu:

add_filter( 'wpga_menu_on_top', '__return_false' );

Personally I still think the default should be at the bottom or under settings, but this looks like the best solution we can hope for. Let’s just hope other plugins don’t start following suit.

Cheers
Simon

Thanks Anton. This has been bothering me for the past month – I appreciate your contribution.