Daniel Immke has published his own primer on using native user interface elements for the administration of plugins. By following his basic primer, you’ll be on your way to creating a plugin that looks and functions as if it were a part of the core of WordPress which is what plugin developers should be aiming for. WooCommerce is an excellent example of the various UI elements that are built within WordPress that plugin authors should be taking advantage of. ∞
Plugin Review – Expanded Admin Menus
If you’re not happy about WordPress 3.3 taking away the ability to vertically expand and collapse menu items, you now have at least one option to bring back that functionality. Sort of. After quite a bit of discussion amongst community members regarding the new menu flyouts in WordPress 3.3, Aaron D. Campbell contributed with a thought out post which concluded with a link to a plugin he created called Expanded Admin Menus.
After activating the plugin in WordPress 3.3 Beta 1, this is what your left handed navigational menus will look like.
Unfortunately, it’s a far cry from what users enjoyed in WordPress 3.2.1. Instead of being able to choose which main menu item is expanded or collapsed, all of them are expanded. That deafening cry of pain you hear is from mouse scroll wheels all across the globe. After using the plugin for five minutes, it was clear to me that it’s even more of a usability nightmare for myself then dealing with the flyout menus. With all menu items presented at once, my eyes have to scroll through each one to find the specific link I’m looking for. I’m presented with too much information at one time making browsing a pain in the neck. If that were not enough, the collapsed menu looks completely different than the normal collapsed menu, probably due to the CSS it uses.
Collapsed Version Of Expanded Menu Items
While I’m not going to discount the use of this plugin because of that particular bug, the bottom line is that this plugin does not solve the problem that the forum thread was dedicated to. It’s not about having all of the admin menus opened or closed. It was the end user opportunity to pick and choose which menus were vertically expanded or collapsed while being able to have multiple menus opened or closed. Nice effort on the part of Aaron to provide an option to users who loved that particular feature in WordPress 3.2 but in its current form, the plugin comes nowhere close to solving the problem.
The Header Won’t Be Changing In 2.8
The results for the WordPress design challenge poll are in and it looks like the dark fluency style has emerged as the winner. But as Jane mentions in the official blog post, the results are interesting. Overall, the various Fluency variations made up for a large majority of the votes but on the flipside, the choice for keeping the current implementation came out in second place which is definitely something worth noting.
According to Jane, the current implementation will remain the same in WordPress 2.8 however, a new header design will be worked on for WordPress 2.9 so that enough time can be given to perform usability testing.
As I went through and voted, I can’t say any particular design attracted me more so then the others. I think I spent about 5-7 minutes reviewing each design never having a concrete decision on which one I wanted. In the end, I chose Fluency Style, Medium. But you know, I thought about it and I don’t use the header area that much anyways. The only time I actually use the header is to click on the VISIT SITE link. What about you? How often do you find yourself clicking around in the header area and which version did you vote for?