WordPress lead developer Mark Jaquith has released a new WordPress plugin called Menu Humility that stops plugins from adding menu items to the top of the WordPress Dashboard navigation, which some plugins do, and instead moves them to the bottom. Jaquith described his motivation in the plugin’s description:
Some plugins (I’m looking at you, Automattic) put top level nav menus in the first menu group, right under “Dashboard.” This is annoying. These things are invariably less important than your posts, pages, comments, etc. This simple plugin (with no UI) shoves these line-cutting menus to the bottom, where they belong.
With his recently released Logo Login and WP Help plugins, Jaquith might be making some of the simplest Single PurposeTM plugins I’ve seen in a while. They do what they say, and require next to no setup or options. These sorts of plugins are the ones I use as inspiration when determining which parts of my functionality plugins to make into standalone plugins.
You can check out Jaquith’s other plugins on his WordPress.org profile. Has anyone else been annoyed by plugins adding menu items to the top of the screen? Do you use any other plugins to manage your WordPress dashboard menu?
Pro
Wonderful name.
Thanks for pointing out Mark’s WP Help plugin. I wasn’t aware of that one until now. It also looks like a terrific plugin.
It’s geting to the point that WP needs to implement UI guidelines for plugin and theme devs. Either that or a dead easy way to build rich backend pages.
Brilliant idea for a plugin! I agree with him entirely; plugin menus should never take priority over the core menu links. This could make a very nice dashboard tidy-up!