Admin Menu Editor For WordPress

Admin Menu Editor is 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.

Features

  • Sort menu items any way you want by simple drag & drop.
  • Move a menu item to a different submenu via cut & paste.
  • Edit any existing menu – change the title, access rights, menu icon and so on. Note that in the free version you can’t relax menu permissions – i.e. give access rights to a role that originally didn’t have them – 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 :

Admin Menu Editor screenshot

This plugin also has a Pro version that offers a bunch of extra features.

Download

admin-menu-editor.zip

The latest version of the plugin is always available on WordPress.org.

Requirements :

  • WordPress 4.1 or later
  • PHP 5.2 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 😉
  • As I mentioned before, the access rights required for using a particular menu item can’t be lowered, but can be made more strict. This has been fixed in the Pro version.
  • Plugin menus that are moved to a different submenu will not work unless you put the full page URL in the “URL” field. This is because WP “ties” the menu item to it’s parent menu and won’t recognize it in a different submenu.
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544 Responses to “Admin Menu Editor For WordPress”

  1. Jim says:

    I dont know if anyone here can help…

    I quite pleased with the plugin and I have the pro version working just fine based on roles for the admin menu side bar except for one aspect. The media gallery (showing all member pictures) still appears within the file upload pop-up menu when a subscriber is uploading his own pictures or pages. ( he/she has the ability to still see all pictures – not just their own). I’ve found a php code solution for this – but it only works when added into the parent php theme – not the child. I thought i’d check here as well to see if there is something I’m missing in the setup process to unseat / or remove the media library tab from the pop-up media / upload window. Any thoughts or guidance would be appreciated. thank you jim

  2. Jānis Elsts says:

    You’re not missing anything – Admin Menu Editor (either free or Pro) only works with the admin menu and doesn’t affect the media window tabs.

    See this page for one possible solution.

    If you can’t/don’t want to add code to the parent theme, you could turn it into a mini-plugin. Just add a plugin header to the code and save it in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory. Example:

    <?php
    /*
    Plugin Name: My Plugin
    Plugin URI: {Some URL here}
    Description: This plugin does stuff.
    Version: 1.0
    Author: John Smith
    */
    
    /* ... your code here ... */
    
  3. Jim says:

    thank you for this – it is greatly appreciated. Solved / resolved with your input and some added info from a similar blog – have created my first (mini)-plugin that takes care of this challenge. : )

  4. Nathan says:

    Your plugin produces an error with add link to Facebook. Its gets error in license-manager/LicenseManager.php. I tried it in two different wordpress blogs. Both of them get a error.an

  5. […] плагина: Janis Elsts Рассматриваемая версия: 1.1.10 от 29.07.2012 Текущая версия: […]

  6. Gavin says:

    Does not appear to work.

    I am trying to hide everything but the Posts and Comments in the free version (eventually for Editors once we get paid version) but all of the default WP menu times keep appearing.

    Is this a free version thing?

    Can I hide these from view completely for our Editors in the paid version? If so , how?

  7. Jānis Elsts says:

    How are you trying to hide them? Basically, there are two ways to hide a menu (in the free version):

    – Select it and click the “Hide” button (the one with the grey puzzle piece icon). This makes the menu invisible to everyone, but you can still access it by URL.

    – Set the menu’s required capability to something that the users who shouldn’t see it don’t have. For example, if you want only Administrators to have access to menu, you could set it to “manage_options”.

    Note: If you want to hide an entire top-level menu, you’ll need to repeat the same procedure for all of its submenus.

    In the paid version, setting permissions is a bit easier since it has a list of roles that lets you directly select the roles that you want/don’t want to see a particular menu.

  8. Melissa says:

    Hi, The plugin doesn’t work with the newest wordpress version….

  9. Jānis Elsts says:

    What specifically is the problem? Everything looks fine on my test site.

  10. Michael says:

    Hi
    I’m having problems accessing any user role / capability plugins recently. I can’t say for sure it is this plugin but when I deactivate admin menu editor all is fine. When activated I get the “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.” I also have s2members(pro) installed and if I leave your plugin active and deactivate s2m I can then access any user role editor I install. So someone is not playing nice together. All software is at current versions AME is the free version). User role plugins I’ve tried are Members,User Role Editor and Capability Manager Enhanced.
    Thanks for your time and the plugin.

  11. Jānis Elsts says:

    I can’t reproduce this problem on any of my test sites, but that’s not too surprising considering that I only have the free version of S2Member.

    Some ideas:

    – Try resetting your admin menu configuration. To do so, log in as an administrator, make sure Admin Menu Editor is active and go to “http://example.com/wp-admin/?reset_admin_menu=1” (replace example.com with your own domain). Do you still get the same error when trying to access a user role editor?

    – Do role editor plugins still show up in the admin menu when AME and S2Member are active, or are they completely gone? Do their menus show up in the menu editor?

    – Different role editing plugins typically have different access requirements. It’s strange that the same plugin conflict or bug would prevent you from using all of them. Perhaps it blocks all pages under the “Users” menu?…

  12. Michael says:

    I will do the tests you mentioned (away from computer).
    I can say if the link is /user.php?page=ccaps I get the error. But if I change the URL to admin.php?page=ccaps the page will load. (This is the last mentioned pluggin).
    Also s2 uses separators in its sub menu with AME active the separators are messed up. Can you reproduce that. The free version of s2 is very much the same I don’t think the pro version adds anything major that would make a difference. But I will try my current set up with both versions. I’m banned from the credit card so I can not buy your pro version.
    Thanks for the help and pleasant support.

  13. Michael says:

    Ok so I did the reset and everything worked fine. I then reorganized my admin menu and after saving it (Capability Manager Enhanced) is no longer accessible. I can replicate this with AME (free) and s2 (free) on a separate setup using the same sort of rearrangement with the menu. It seems with playing around that when I move s2 (free or pro) from it’s default location I then lose access to /users.php?page=capsman. It (AME) seems to remove all but one of the separators that s2 uses in it’s sub menu.

    So all seems to work now that I dropped s2 to the bottom (default location) but the two are not happy with each other.

  14. Jānis Elsts says:

    Oh, so you’re moving plugin menus around. That doesn’t always work too well in the free version. Depending on where you move a plugin menu, WordPress can sometime lose track of the correct menu URL and display a permissions error when you try to access it.

    This has been fixed in the Pro version, and it should also work fine in the development version of the free plugin (scroll down to the “Other versions” section).

  15. Michael says:

    I see..Got it. Thanks for your time.

  16. […] to take a look at to hide certain dashboard menu button’s in your admin dashboard is called: Admin Menu Editor. Click on that link to read the features of this plugin. Check out the quote below for a small bit […]

  17. Nick says:

    I found work around for needing to use a complete url to move plugins to a different submenu.

    Try adding
    ../
    after wp-admin in the url field.

    so the relative url for the “Menu Editor” options page would be:
    wp-admin/../options-general.php?page=menu_editor.

    Not sure if this is a permanent fix or if it will work in every situation but for it worked me.

  18. I am having a problem. I want a menu item that doesn’t go anywhere. In the free version I could use # for the menu item. Now if I put that in, the menu item gets deleted. Is there any way to have menu items that are unclickable??

    Chris

  19. This plugin is so broken. It just keep deleting menu items and rearranging items. You need to fix this.

  20. Jānis Elsts says:

    You can still use # for the URL; I just tested it locally and didn’t notice any issues.

    Maybe the problem is that you already have one menu set to # and you’re trying to create another one? Due to technical limitations in WP admin menus are implemented, it is not possible to have two top level menus with identical URLs. Try using something like #second_menu instead.

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