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. Jānis Elsts says:

    There are a couple of different things that can cause that. The three most likely possibilities are:

    a) A PHP error. Take a look at the PHP error log and see if there are any entries where the timestamp matches the time when you tried to save menu settings.

    b) An excessively aggressive or misconfigured firewall. Is the server running ModSecurity or anything similar? In some configurations, a firewall like that can incorrectly flag the “save changes” request as malicious and block it. Please check the firewall logs if you have access to them. This problem can usually be fixed by adjusting firewall settings.

    c) Low request size limits on the web server. Some hosting providers impose very strict limits on how much data you can send with a HTTP POST request. The menu configuration can be pretty large – 100 KB or more – which is sometimes enough to exceed those limits. You can probably find out if this is what’s going on by checking the web server’s error log (not the same thing as the PHP error log), but I’m not certain about this one.

  2. Justs says:

    The provider loosened up the PHP-rights of the website and now everything works like it should. Thanks for the reply!

  3. Hobbs says:

    Unable to use this plugin now, due to whenever updating a page while this is enabled, the website just loads a ‘page cannot be displayed’ error and nothing updates.

    Will have to disable the plugin until next update.

    Hope you can fix this.

  4. Jānis Elsts says:

    Thank you for the report. To fix the problem, it would be useful to know what actually caused it. Are there any recent entries in your PHP error log? How high is the PHP memory usage on your site? If it’s already close to the limit, installing this plugin might be enough to push it over and cause errors like the one you’ve encountered.

  5. Bill says:

    I am also getting this error. I’m trying to move the Posts menu item down and the Announcements up. After trying to save the changes, I end up on the following page with the error that follows.

    https://www.firsthebrew.org/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=menu_editor&sub_section=editor&noheader=1

    Sorry no page found
    Try clicking on one of the menu items above or clicking the back button in your browser.

  6. Jānis Elsts says:

    @Bill: That sounds like there could be a PHP error or server configuration issue. Please see my earlier comment for some ideas and suggestions.

  7. John says:

    Hello, dear developer of such a useful plugin as “Admin Menu Editor” is. As I said, I find your plugin very useful, but I had to deactivate it and I’m going to remove it because of conflict with “W3 Total Cache Plugin” that couses last one impossible to activate if was deactivated while “Admin Menu Editor” is active.

    And even more, when I though that it’s a problem with “W3 Total Cache Plugin” itself I tried to reinstall it, as occurred that’s impossible without causing some minor glitches afterward. And as I knew that only “Admin Menu Editor” was recently installed after which problem had started, I deactivated it and everything had come to normal again.

    So, if you can test your plugin a little more to check this issue, so you can see if this problem realy exixts and if so to solve it – it would be great! But maybe it’s just something with my site, have a bunch of other plugins installed… Anyway, thank you for a great plugin and keep up a good work! Thank you for give it away for free , for some people it’s realy helpful.

  8. Jānis Elsts says:

    Thank you for the report. If possible, could you please provide more details about what exactly happened when you tried to activate W3 Total Cache when Admin Menu Editor was active? And what glitches did you notice?

    I ask this because I seem to recall testing this plugin with W3 Total Cache last year and I didn’t notice any issues at that time. Of course, both plugins have been updated several times since then, so it’s entirely possible that some new conflict has appeared.

  9. kai says:

    hey the plugin is great! but wondering is it possible to make the divider actually show a line, like a 1 px border

  10. Jānis Elsts says:

    No, that’s currently not possible with this plugin.

    If you’re familiar with HTML/CSS, maybe you could add a new menu item, give it a custom class, and then use CSS to style it as a divider.

  11. jon says:

    I use your plugin and I love it, but on my new website 5math.co.il it does not work. how can I fix it?

  12. Jānis Elsts says:

    Could you elaborate on “does not work”? What exactly does it mean in this context?

  13. Tom Denison says:

    Hello,
    1. What happens after I rearrange my dashboard and deactivate the plugin?
    Does the dashboard return to the old settings?

    2. If I want to purposely return to the WP dashboard default, how would I do that?

    Sincerely,
    Tom

  14. Jānis Elsts says:

    1. Yes, the admin menu will return to its original state. Because WordPress builds the admin menu “on the fly” instead of storing it in the database, it’s not actually possible to make permanent changes to the menu without constantly running a plugin (though you could change role capabilities and that would affect which menu items they can see).

    2. The menu editor has a “Load default menu” button that you can use to load the default settings.

  15. Pierre Hunt says:

    I am astonished that there is such well-developed software out there. Thank you for that

    It does exactly what I want and more

    Could I ask if you can refer me to an SEO/Cache/Optimizer plugin that you know works well with your script, please

    Regards

    Pierre

  16. Jānis Elsts says:

    Admin Menu Editor has nothing to do with SEO/caching/optimization, so I’m not sure how one would determine if a SEO tool (etc) works well with this plugin. I don’t have any advice in this regard.

  17. Chinthaka says:

    Is there to add a line as a separator, If not can you add that feature – it will be easy for your eyes
    THX

  18. Jānis Elsts says:

    There’s a button to add new separators, but by default menu separators in WordPress are transparent (i.e. just empty space). If you want a solid line instead, you could try the Pro version – it has separator style settings that can be used to change separator color and thickness.

  19. James says:

    Hi! Is there anyway to keep the sidebar opened when selecting a page? The menu I’m implementing call a xxxx.php file and it works fine, but the left bar disappears and I need to click back in browser. Thanks!

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