Just recently I launched my latest plugin: WP Custom Admin Interface: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-custom-admin-interface/
This is a free plugin available on the WordPress content management system platform. It is designed to help website administrators better customise the WordPress interface. Why would you want to redesign the WordPress interface you ask? Well firstly sometimes you want to provide special branded experience to clients or customers of your website. You don’t want people to know it’s WordPress website, as this is their website and this is your work. Make it look nice.
Secondly, WordPress itself and external plugins can clutter up the interface, especially the main menu. You want to provide a simple and targeted interface so customers don’t feel overwhelmed. You want to keep the interface as simple and clean as you possibly can. Lastly exposing plugins and other menu items to users can be either a security issue or can present an opportunity for clients or customers to make unintentional changes to your site without your knowledge.
It’s in everyone’s interest to have a dedicated admin menu and to make it look nice in the process and this what WP Custom Admin Interface does so well. I previously used a collection of around 5-6 small plugins to do the equivalent changes but now with this plugin I can do everything with one install. The plugin features a really simple settings export feature which will enable you to deploy settings to multiple websites. This can be really handy for people who manage multiple client websites.
The key feature of the plugin is the admin menu editor. Unlike other free plugins this admin menu editor is fully featured and provides a way show a menu to specific roles or users. So as an administrator you can easily show your custom menu to everyone except administrators so you can access the normal menu whilst everyone else can access the simplified menu.
Below are some of the key features of the custom admin menu builder:
CUSTOM ADMIN MENU FEATURES
- Seamlessly re-arrange menu items with a drag and drop interface, rearrange both top and bottom level menu items
- Easily rename any menu item, this can be handy if you want to call posts ‘news’ for example
- Drag and drop top level menu items to sub level menu items and vice versa. Move any menu item anywhere!
- Create new menu items and drag them to any position, you can set a custom link which can be an internal or external link
- Change the icon of any top level menu item from over 230 Dashicons or you can even upload your own icon, or choose an icon provided by custom plugins
- Change more advanced properties like custom CSS classes, capability access and link target of any menu item
- Add separators to space out top level menus
- Restore a menu to the last save or to the standard WordPress menu
- Using the simple condition builder easily apply the custom menu to select roles or users! You can say apply my menu to everyone/no-one except: x condition, y condition etc.
But WP Custom Admin Interface is more then just an admin menu editor it is packed with a whole bunch of other goodies as well. This includes:
ALL THE OTHER GREAT FEATURES
- Change the login screen background color
- Change the login screen logo
- Add a custom favicon to the backend and frontend of your website
- Change the link and button colors
- Customize the footer text which appears on every admin page and use a variety of nifty shortcodes like [year] to show the current year (for use in copyright text).
- Remove the WordPress version number from the footer
- Remove the admin toolbar from displaying on the frontend of WordPress
- Add custom admin CSS
- Add custom login CSS
- Add custom Javascript/jQuery
- Add custom PHP to WordPress
- Create a coming soon/maintenance page with custom content and set a future expiry date to make your site live
- Create a custom dashboard widget
- Disable automatic updates
- Export and import settings
WP Custom Admin Interface provides an awesome and simple interface to customize the backend of WordPress to provide a more customized experience for you and your clients or customers. Did I mention it’s free?!
Support can be found on the WordPress forum and the plugin is also translatable and has some translations for European languages already complete. Please install the plugin today and let me know what you think via the feedback tab in the plugin settings.
