AdminSanity

AdminSanity brings sanity through sanitization to your WordPress Admin Area. Cleanly.

AdminSanity started as a Gist to address the WordPress Admin Menu clutter, automatically splitting and re-ordered menu to clean up the mess that appears as more and more plugins are added to a WordPress site. This idea was inspired by this TRAC proposal for a “Simplified WordPress Admin Navigation”, as a proof of concept for a potential core Feature plugin.

Now, it includes modules not just for cleaning up and improving accesss to both the Admin Menu and Admin Bar, but also includes a module for turning Admin Notice clutter at the top of your admin screen into an tabbed notice type display interface! This means a sigh of relief guaranteed, or your money back! (Actually nevermind – it’s free – just like your Admin Area soon will be free of clutter!)

Oh and plus did I mention it supports responsive width changes and admin colour schemes?! 😀

AdminSanity Menu

The AdminSanity Menu module automatically sorts the Admin Menu into three sections:

• Content – Dashboard, all Post Types | Media, Links and Comments
• Manage – Settings, [Plugin Settings], Appearance, Plugins, Users, Tools
• Extensions – any other extra top level menu items not present by default

And, to add an extra layer of navigation accessibility, a meta-menu level has been added to each of the Admin Menu sections, with the corresponding labels: Content, Manage and Extensions. So that rather than trying to replace the existing Admin Menu design (which would be hard to make backwards compatible), it is just adapted to provide improved menu access.

Additionally, a new “Plugin Settings” menu item has been added, with any Settings submenu items moved there that are not there by default (ie. from WordPress itself.) This greatly improves the ease of navigation in your admin area when searching for either Core or Plugin settings.

Then, for even faster ease of access, an “Expand menu” icon has been added at the top of the Admin Menu (to complement the existing “Collapse menu” icon at the bottom) which expands to provide a full page three column display of the entire Admin Menu with all submenus expanded so you can instantly see every menu at once. Wow!

AdminSanity Notices

The AdminSanity Notice module attempts to solve probably the most long-standing thorn in any WordPress user’s side – the distracting amount of NOTICES at the top of every single Admin page! By providing a tabbed interface for notice types (Error, Update, Warnings, Messages, Notices), you get a colour-coded and at-a-glance display of how many notices of each type there are, so you can prioritize and stay on task.

Clicking on any of the notice types instantly displays all the notices for that type. Nice! And as an added bonus, if you want to access Notices by their user notice level, you can do that too. Clicking on the Notices label reveals an extra tab menu that is sorted by notice type instead: All, General, Network, Admin and User. Neat!

AdminSanity Bar

After experiencing the Admin Bar getting cluttered also and splitting itself into two lines (and thus making some of the bar items unclickable!) I decided to add some responsive height handling to fix the bar display when this happened. And also, add a new “Shuffle” Cycler icon to the start of the Admin Bar, which cycles the visibility of the different Admin Bar items. Each click of the icon will cycle through three display options, giving you faster access to what you were looking for:

• All Bar menu items (Default Admin Bar view)
• Default Bar menu items (added by WordPress)
• Non-default Bar menu items (from plugins and themes)

And again, similar to the Admin Menu, for faster ease of access to all Admin Bar items at once, a “Dropdown” toggle item is added at the end of the Admin Bar, providing an expanded view of all bar menu items and their submenus (including nested submenus which are accessible via dropdown arrows for those submenu items.) Nifty!

Come Get Some Admin Sanity!

Isn’t it time for AdminSanity to bring some sanity back to your Admin Area?!