Custom Favorite Actions For WP 2.7 (Beta)

The upcoming WordPress 2.7 will include a “favorite actions” feature - a dropdown menu that is supposed to contain quick links for easy access to select dashboard pages. The dropdown starts out with a few preset links, and new links can be added by plugins.

Power To The Users

I think it would make more sense to let the users themselves choose what goes into this quick-access menu (incidentally, Ozh has proposed something similar). It wouldn’t be realistic to devise a “one size fits all” list of defaults, and giving the user more control over his/her site is usually a good thing. There’s also the potential problem of every plugin wanting to push it’s own link into the dropdown…

So I wrote a plugin. Yep, 2.7 isn’t even in public beta yet, and I’ve already got a plugin for it :) This plugin, Custom Favorites, will allow you to easily add and remove dashboard pages from the “favorite actions” list. Here’s how it works : you start out with a blank (almost) list of favorites - default links and those added by other plugins are automatically removed. You can add a link to the menu by navigating to any admin page and selecting “Add this page” from the dropdown. To remove a page, open the page again and choose “Remove this page” from the dropdown.

Obligatory Disclaimers

Needless to say this is not the most stable and bug-free plugin, at least not yet. But if you’re already playing around with WP 2.7 then that warning probably won’t deter you ;) And if you want to try it out with WP 2.6.x, you can - the plugin will switch to the “compatibility mode” and use a normal dashboard menu for the favorite links (this is probably only useful together with a dropdown menu plugin like this one).

Notice : I don’t recommend using this plugin if your blog allows user registration. The current version may present a security risk in that situation. You have been warned.

Download

custom-favorites.zip (8 KB)

Requirements :

  • WordPress 2.7
  • PHP 5 or later
  • MySQL 4.1 or later

Damn, and I promised to never write a plugin that could be quickly obsoleted by changes in WP core. Grr.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 20:24 and is filed under Applications, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Custom Favorite Actions For WP 2.7 (Beta)”

  1. 1
    Artem Russakovskii says:
    December 29, 2008 at 15:59

    Worked like a charm. Great work on this while we wait for WP to implement the same feature.

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