Admin Menu Editor For WordPress
Here is my latest and hack-iest plugin yet – Admin Menu Editor. It’s a WordPress plugin that will let you manually edit the Dashboard menu. You can reorder the menus, show/hide specific items, change access rights, and more. The plugin is still a bit rough around the edges, so a good understading of WP internals is recommended (but not required).
Features
- Sort menu items any way you want by simple drag & drop.
- Move a menu item to a different submenu via cut & paste. Note that if you move an item that belongs to a plugin, you will need to modify the “File” attribute to point to the right parent file (e.g. instead of “akismet-key-config” use “options-general.php?page=akismet-key-config”).
- Edit any existing menu – change the title, access rights, menu icon and so on. Note that you can’t lower the required access rights, but you can change them to be more restrictive.
- Hide/show any menu or menu item. A hidden menu is invisible to all users, including administrators.
- Create custom menus that point to any part of the Dashboard. For example, you could create a new menu leading directly to the “Pending comments” page.
Here’s a screenshot :
Download
menu-editor.zip (27 KB)
Requirements :
- WordPress 2.7 or later
- PHP 5 or later
Known Issues
The basic idea for the plugin was suggested by several commenters way back in October. However, the internal menu system that WordPress uses is obscure and unsuitable for direct manipulation, so I spent quite a while inventing workarounds. And even after a few weeks of pondering, there are some things I haven’t quite fixed.
- If you delete any of the default menus they will reappear after saving. This is not a bug, it’s a feature
- You can’t use arbitrary URLs as menu targets because WordPress will automatically strip off the “http:/”.
- As I mentioned before, the access rights required for using a particular menu item can’t be lowered, but can be made more strict. I think.
- Also, a plugin’s menu that is moved to a different submenu will not work unless you also include the parent file in the “File” field. This is because WP “ties” the menu item to it’s parent menu and won’t recognize it in a different submenu.
Merry Christmas, by the way 
[...] Admin Menu Editor [...]
Wanted to let you know that the plugin author URL links back to http://w-shadow.com/blog/2008/12/20/admin-menu-edi%EF%BF%BD-for-wordpress/ which doesn’t exist. Also, I think it would be cool if you provided 1-3 options of sorting menus. For instance, I’d simply like the menu to be rearranged in alphabetical order. Other than that, I’m having fun dragging and dropping.
[...] Admin Menu Editor – Lets you directly edit the WordPress admin menu. You can re-order, hide or rename existing menus, add custom menus and more. Beta. By Janis Elsts. [...]
[...] Administração do Menu e Dashboard do Wordpress (tags: menu dashboard wordpress CMS PLUGINS admin wpmu) [...]
Fixed. I thought about adding sort buttons, but decided to leave them out in the first release. So it’s probable I’ll add this feature eventually.
[...] att passa in på eyesx.com. Klicka på “Läs mer” för att se hela listan av tillägg. Admin Menu Editor – Ett meny tillägg för att arrangera ordningen av de nya menyn i 2.7. Av Janis [...]
Hi, I’m getting a syntax error when I’m trying to activate the plugin
“Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /var/www/…/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/menu-editor/menu-editor.php on line 26″
You probably have an old version of PHP. This plugin requires PHP 5 or later.
hi!
many thanks for this plugin.
unfortunately i get a fatal error while activating this plugin:
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class Services_JSON in /var/www/stpa/wp-content/plugins/menu-editor/JSON.php on line 116
Should be fixed now. Download again from the same link.
[...] Admin Menu Editor [...]
it works now! many thanks!
[...] Admin Menu Editor [...]
Could this plug-in be extended to hide menus on the post page such as:
Tags
Categories
Excerpt
Send Trackbacks
Custom Fields
Discussion
Post Arthur
An example would be greatly appreciated!
Nevermind, found this great plugin:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cms-post-control/
THANKS!
@Dorian – That type of functionality is provided by WordPress 2.7 as part of the major UI changes/redesign they did. Sounds like you are not using WordPress 2.7 which I highly encourage you to do so.
[...] Admin Menu Editor [...]
I have installed the plugin and get the buttons at the top, however I am not getting any of the menu items below. I did not see any readme file, so I am assuming its as easy as uploading and activating. Any ideas?
That’s probably some kind of JavaScript error. I’ll need to know the error message to find the exact problem.
Various browsers have different ways to view JS error messages. AFAIK, Firefox has multiple addons that will let you do that (Firebug, Web Developer, etc). In Opera, it’s Tools -> Advanced -> Error Console. As for IE… I think there’s a little “error” icon in the lower-left corner of the status bar that you can double-click to show the last error message.