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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Worked like a charm. Great work on this while we wait for WP to implement the same feature.
Hey shadow, I was revisiting my plugins and found this one is loading its admin javascript on regular pages. I know it was a one-off plugin but are you still maintaining it at all?
Have you seen the discussion of how to load plugins properly at http://beerpla.net/2010/01/13/wordpress-plugin-development-how-to-include-css-and-javascript-conditionally-and-only-when-needed-by-the-posts ?
Fixed. This plugin may not be actively maintained, but I usually fix reported bugs even in one-off plugins.
And yes, I’ve read your post (and the follow-up). However, my strong lurker tendencies tend to deter me from participating in such discussions 😉
[…] already discussed favorite actions in another post. To summarize, the user needs to be in control of what goes into that menu. As is, the dropdown […]