Creating simplified CMS overlay for Admin dashboard

assign user as author…. do not give full admin..
then the options are limited to..
post, media, comments, profile, tools… nothing else…

Some clients need access to the Appearance menus. To allow that I set client users to Admin and use Adminimize plugin to restrict access to certain menu items. You, as the main Admin can access all menu items by going to Settings > Adminimize and all items are available.

The way i have gone about to simplify the backend for my clients is by using this plugin:

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/members/

With it you can set specific privileges for a user role (e.g. ‘contributor’). You can prevent the user from changing core settings, theme options, deleting post etc. For admin pages that can’t be removed by changing privileges you can use these functions:

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/remove_submenu_page
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/remove_menu_page

To prevent the pages to be removed from the admin user set the functions inside a conditional statment like so:

function my_remove_menu_pages() {
   if ( current_user_can('administrator') == false ) {
      remove_menu_page('link-manager.php');
   }
} add_action( 'admin_menu', 'my_remove_menu_pages' );

Hope this was helpfull!