In my development work on the template for a ds106 assignment bank site I’ve been learning a bit more how through code I can add menus and submenu items to the wordpress dashboard. I was thinking about that while editing some of the items set in the queue for the Daily Create.
On this site, each published post is a single daily create, the ones that people submit via our form end up as draft posts, and the ones lined up ready to go are scheduled posts (published but set to a future date). The thing is when working with these, I end up having to first go to the posts menu, then clicking the menu link for “Scheduled” or “Drafts” to edit:
And I was wondering if it would be possible to add some submenu items to the Posts menu on the left side to reduce the clicks by 50%
There are built in wordpress functions to do this, like add_posts_page, but it seemed to require a function to build a custom page, not just redirect to another existing one – the link to the drafts editing page is
http://xxxx.xxxx.xxx/wp-admin/edit.php?post_status=draft&post_type=post
This seemed doable, but for grins I looked for a plugin and found something way better- the Admin Menu Editor, which not allows you to add menus, but to re-arrange or edit the names of existing ones.
So I was not only able to add these two frequently used menu shortcuts, I could name it from a “Posts” menu to a “TDC” menu
This is not hugely significant, but as part of the spreading the duties, I am hoping to train some of out headless ds106 volunteers how to manage this site- the menu names and new ones will help. I hope.
This is the editing screen you get- you can change any existing menu items on the dashboard; and I was able to add my two new items:
(click image to see full size)
In theory you could hide menu items (though it does not take their function away, better to manage this with roles and capabilities), but it could simplify the menus for people who are not WP junkies.
There are a lot more you can di to customize the dashboard, but this is simple, and useful.
