One of the first things I wanted to improve in the admin area of my WordPress blog, back in the 1.5 days, was the header menu. I wanted to be able to reach any admin page in one click, instead of first clicking on the first level link ("Manage" for example) and then only on a submenu link ("Comments") So came a very neat plugin : the WordPress Admin Drop Down Menu
When WordPress 2.7 and its new and optimized user interface came, I thought there was still room for improvements: a horizontal menu gave the admin area more of a "desktop application" feel, and I think it's superior to a vertical menu. So I updated the WordPress Admin Drop Down Menu.
Download
Get the plugin :
ozh-admin-drop-down-menu.zip
Extract and upload to your blog, preserving directory structure.
Note: download counter here and stats on wordpress.org may differ and reflect the number of downloads before this plugin was hosted on the plugin directory
Activate and enjoy. Another friendly install & forget piece of PHP.
Features
- Customizable color scheme with a neat color picker
- Normal mode for regular users, compact mode for real estate maniacs, minimal mode for those who never have enough
- Optional cute icons from FamFamFam
- Enhanced compatibility with handheld devices
- Joy and happiness for every day
Javascript is involved for advanced features and to make stuff compatible with MSIE6, but on any decent browser everything works even with Javascript disabled.
Super neat color picking.
Any color you'll love.
Normal or compact display.
Browser compatibility
The plugin has been developed on Firefox 3, Chrome and MSIE7. It should do fine with MSIE6 and Safari too.
There are glitches with Firefox 2 and Camino which both use a deprecated rendering engine. There are also glitches with Opera. I won't fix these, but if anyone wants to submit a CSS patch to resolve one of these issue, you're welcome :)
Developer friendly
The plugin comes with a wickedly cool API that will allow other plugin developers to interact with it, like adding your own custom icon for your plugin. Read the API for Coders page for examples and documentation. Also, all elements the plugin produces get custom CSS classes and id's to allow easy styling or selecting.
Translations
The plugin is ready for interglobanalization and there is a .pot template file included so polyglots can even make their own translation and sent the .mo and .po files to me that I'll include in the package.
The plugin comes with the following translations, in no particular order:
- Turkish, thanks to Baris Ünver
- Korean, thanks to Jong-In Kim
- Spanish, thanks to Karin Sequen
- Italian, thanks to Gianni Diurno
- Deutsch, thanks to Frasier Crane
- Russian, thanks to Fat Cow
- Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to Renato Tavares
- Greek, thanks to Friedlich
- Belorussian, thanks to ilyuha
- Hebrew, thanks to Amiad Bareli
- Romanian, thanks to Octav
- Ukrainian , thanks to wpp.pp.ua and Jurko Chervony
- Traditional Chinese, thanks to Paogray and Joan Wang
- Dutch, thanks to Cees van den Heuvel
- Slovak, thanks to Branco from WebHostingGeeks.com
And maybe more since I might totally forget to update this list :)
Older Versions
All my plugins are designed to run on the latest WordPress version available. Upgrade WordPress whenever a new version is out, or be sorry when your site gets compromised.
If for some unintelligent reason you need to get an older version of this plugin, it might be available, yet totally unsupported or recommended. Check here: Other versions.
Feedback, Bug report, Feature request
Sure. Feed me back. Like it? Blog about it. Love it? Click on the download link, see the Paypal button appear, and give it some clicks!
If you're reporting bugs, you're welcome, but please provide a screenshot and informations about your browser & your OS. I'm not supporting deprecated blogs or plugins or browsers, and I can't respond to incomplete bug reports.
If you're suggesting a feature, you're welcome too, but I won't add an admin menu on the public side of the blog, on top of pages. If you're looking after having this menu fixed on top of page, check this companion plugin that works as a plugin to this plugin: Admin Menus Fixed.
Shorter URL
Want to share or tweet this page? Please use this short URL: http://ozh.in/kl
I love this plugin and install it first thing on all my wordpress blogs. Just one minor quibble, on some menus, especially created by other plugins, sometimes you have to have a very firm pulse to access the submenus since they tend to blink out when you move the cursor out of the submenu bar
[…] Admin Drop Down Menu – my post about this (read here) […]
[…] Admin Drop Down Menu – This is a great productivity plugin that takes that little extra step out of the admin menu of clicking on a main link and getting to the submenu – it adds a rollover effect that reveals that dropdown menu for immediate selection. This or a version of it should be implemented in a future version of WordPress. […]
I just installed WPMU, you saved me and my track pad! Also I can confirm it works fine in Safari, Firefox AND Opera on the mac :)
Seriously this is the most underrated plugin ever. Cheers.
the menu breaks when there are too many plugin options in the settings menu.
Doesn't works with NextGEN gallery installed. NextGen's links become incorrect. Had to de-activated it because of that. Please, check it :)
Thanks!
Thanks :) i like ur plugins
Hey love the plugin. Just one thing I wanted to bring up. I installed this on my wordpress Mu site, and in doing so when a user has two or more blogs their blog switcher menu becomes unusable on any other page but the dashboard due to your menus higher z-index. Just thought you might want to let users of Mu know to set their switchermenu class in wpmu-functions to a z-index of like 99 or so. Other than that great plugin. It makes navigation wonderfully easy.
Very useful plugin. I love it. Thank you.
This is a great mod, however, it is broken in IE 7 :(
Perhaps you could place a note in the above post?
Sometimes I found that the menus crept in to view on the left margin of the page when there were many options. Changing line 263 from 900px to 9000px fixed this for me and didn't appear to break anything :-)
Cheers for a great plugin.
I love this plugin, but i had to deactivate it. The problem is that when you have many plugins, the ones to the far right trigger submenus that you can't get to because they close when you mouse off of the main category. It seems like it would be an easy fix to make those submenus 100% of the available width, but i don't know where to make that change. Can you let me know? I'd love to have this plugin working. Thanks again.
Great plugin! thanks for sharing.
I'd just like to confirm that this works fine on Opera. Well, Opera on Ubuntu Linux at least.
I just installed WPMU, you saved me and my track pad! Also I can confirm it works fine in Safari, Firefox AND Opera on the mac :)
the menu breaks when there are too many plugin options in the settings menu.
I was unable to get it to work for me. Just messed up my menu system. Sigh
This is an information that is obviously of great value. This plug-in is exactly what I have been looking for.Thanks for sharing it!
to Joe.. well it does works for me, i mean the NextGen links works..
should it not work for you, try accessing the gallery menu first, after that it's all breeze :)
Ozh, I like the plugin but it messes up the javascript Media Manager uploader in the Write screen. Basically it mucks up the ability to manage the file information and disables the ability to add images to posts.
Jim » Thanks for the notice. It's fixed in 2.0.1
Ozh, I think you should include "installation" section for your plugins. I know it's fairly simple to install most of the plugins, but it's reassuring to see that you have done everything correctly.
I wait for this so long!!! This plugins is even better that the previous version.
Thank you so much!!!
thanks for your works.
Cheers for updating this to work with 2.5! I would honestly hesitate to upgrade simply due to a lack of proper dropdowns in the admin.
Now, here's a nitpick: the active tab in the menus blends very well into the "classic" color scheme, but any user who prefers the "fresh" color scheme is going to be in a for a more jarring experience. Also, last I saw the jury was still out as to which would be the default. I don't know how tough it would be to sniff out which was active, but it's a thought…
This is an absolutely lovely plugin. Thanks! Just one small gripe. Some of us with big screens have our font sizes in Opera/Firefox set up at 16px at a minimum. With that setting, your CSS breaks down. Could you please use "em" units instead of "px" units?
Thanks!
Thank you for nice plugin.
It doesn't go moo on Opera or Safari on Windows.
Any chance this will be updated to work with the Fluency Admin plugin/theme? It rocks on 2.5 but I can only run it or this plugin, but not both. On Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Windows, running both makes the Fluency menus entirely disappear into white nothingness!
Thanks for such an awesome plugin, it will save much time waiting for pages to load only to load a submenu option!
Does not work properly with IE7. As it was said before, it would be nice to tell it in your presentation. Well, for the wordpress 2.3.3 version.
But it's a pleasure to use it.
I see the last commenter mentioned IE 7. Was curious why this was only tested to work for IE 6. I switch the WP 2.5 RC1 to classic color theme, don't know if that matters or not, but all of the menu items have a double extra space between them.
It works great but the statpress plugin is either not giving the right url now, or the drop menus are messing up the statpress url…
many thanks for this. it would be nice though if the css was external to the php file, would make it easier for people to edit their own css and adapt this plugin to other admin themes
Merci beaucoup!!!
Seriously, they pay happy cog for a usability review and did not include dropdown menus in the core? I might tweak the CSS, but thanks for that immensely helpful (and well designed) plugin!
Hmm, one thing though – when an admin screen loads, occasionally, the standard navigation appears briefly before your navigation loads and the standard navigation disppaeards. Is this a necessary consequence of script loading order? jQuery? Can it be avoided? I'm writing a plugin to replace the catgory div with custom content, using jQuery, and I occasionally had the same effect.
And a last one – could be Firebug related. At least it did not appear anymore with firebug disabled. Maybe FB is simply overly slowing the execution.
First I got to say this is a great plugin, saves a lot of clicks and on slow internet makes nice difference.
I'm using WordPress 2.3.3 with the AdminMenu for it. I too have many plugins – 3 line on options.
For those with multiple lines because of so many plugins, I did some tinkering and found an additional semi-fix that's easy to implement.
First, some of the problem can be fixed with what Muniz changed in the plugins php file, on 03/Jul/07:
/* Nested ULs */
$id li ul {
position:absolute;
left:-9000em;
}
Notice, the position left is changed to 9000 and uses em instead of px. Use FIND to find it and make the change.
But this doesn't fix the problem of overlapping the content when displayed, so I figured out a way to push the content down. Using Firefox with WebDevloper, I found there's a section called #submenu which only shows sometimes. You can add padding-bottom and it extends the dark menu area permanently, without overlapping the content. I found that 4em was good for 3 lines.
So…add the following to the styles at the bottom of wp_ozh_adminmenu_wp23.php:
#submenu, #minisub {
padding-bottom: 4em;
}
I also agree that you should add some FAQs and Bug Solutions to the post, mainly so the nest person doesn't have to read through all the comments to get the answer.
I forgot I wanted to add…
My above comment and solution to the multi-line menus problem does still have bugs. In simple terms, the fix permanently adjusts the size of the navigation bar.
The dropdown menus for sections with only one line of links will also have the padding and therefor also much taller. There's also a blue bar positioned under the dropdown menus, which overlaps the extended dark navigation bar.
In case you have three lines of links and set the padding to 4em, the blue bar also covers about 3px of content (ie. the top border of info messages is cutoff, but readable). I didn't pick 5em because it added to much wasted space and I don't care about those 3px.
Anyways, now that thats cleared up, I hope this helps everyone and maybe someone can figure out a way to make it dynamic or something to fix the other problems.
another thing i would suggest for a future update is to get rid of the original menu alltogether. the way things now work, ozhmenu is displayed and admin menu simply hidden, but there is really no reason for it to be put out on the page only to be hidden…
if anybody has an idea how to do it, please let know
Dear Sir,
In IE 7 & 8 Beta, there appears a CSS problem concerning the background-color of links in the drop-down menu. An annoying color is appearing above the text links, which didn't appear to me in IE6.
Thanx – gr8 plugin for 2.5 users :)
Any chance you're working on or planning a version compatible with the Fluency Admin theme? That would be quite excellent, then I would not have to choose one or the other :-)
In IE 7 & 8 Beta, there appears a CSS problem concerning the background-color of links in the drop-down menu. An annoying color is appearing above the text links, which didn’t appear to me in IE6.
Can you make this compatible with the Custom Write Panel plugin? I prefer your setup over the other drop down menu options but for some reason this doesn't function with CWP, meaning I don't get a drop down with my CWP options.
Other than that you've got a fantastic plugin here. Thanks
Doc4 » Will have a look. No guarantee :)
This is a very nice plugin!!! Definitely saving a few clicks is worthwhile!!!
Works fine on my IE6 and FF2 with WP2.5
Can I leave feature requests here?
I like how it shows the number of comments that are awaiting moderation beside the word Comment along the top.
I have a lot of posts that get submitted that I need to moderate. How about adding the same little number beside the word Manage, which would show the number of Unpublished (Draft) posts awaiting moderation.
Thanks
jsherk » Interesting suggestion. However I'm not sure where it would be appropriate to add this: "Manage" is for posts as well as pages, links, categories, etc.. I'm keeping it mind nonetheless, thanks for it!
Great plugin!
I modified it a little bit to keep the default menus visible (except the top one). This plugin works great for accesing a submenu on a diferent section, but I find more easy to access a submenu in the current section using the normal menu, so, a combination of the two wins :)
If anyone wants to do the same, just edit wp_ozh_adminmenu.php and add "//" without "" in front of the lines 146, 147, 148 and 150.
Again, thanks for this great plugin.
Ahhhh, nice. :)
Not only doesn't go mooooooo on Safari 3.1 (Mac OS X 10.5.2), but removes one of my major irritations with WP2.5.
Thank you.