As part of their ongoing series, WPEngineer has published a cool post that explains how to add new menus to the admin bar coming in WordPress 3.1. In the example, Frank adds a Codex Search button to the admin bar which is pretty convenient! He covers the function add_menu() and it’s various parameters as well. In the comments of that post however, Latz brings up an interesting point.
Oh great, now every plugin will put a menu in the admin bar, Next stop: a plugin preventing others from cluttering the admin bar.
While it’s pretty funny to think about the admin bar containing menus for all sorts of different plugins, it’s a potential problem that users may have to deal with in the future. Hopefully, plugin authors are diligent with not adding a menu to their options page as part of the default package of a plugin. For certain plugins, the idea works well but not for all of them.
So while this is a neat little tutorial on how to add menus to the admin bar, are you worried that plugin developers may take this too far?
I will definitely have to watch out for these “features” in upcoming plugins. It is already bad enough that plugin authors put the settings for their plugins under different menu areas in WordPress (sometimes under Settings, sometimes under as a totally new menu item in the left-sidebar, sometimes buried elsewhere).
The best way to avoid “plugin creep” is to be careful and ask yourself the question “do I really need this plugin, or is there a better way to do what I want?” Oh, and always make sure to keep your plugins up-to-date and always uninstall a plugin right away if you decide it doesn’t fit your needs.
Hopefully plugin authors don’t abuse the admin bar, but trying to prevent it could be a challenge. I think that any plugins that do add something to the admin bar should make it optional, and preferably off by default.
Personally I’m adding an option to the next release of Fluency Admin which will give the users the option (turned off by default) of adding the wp-admin menu (in drop-down menu form) to the admin bar for quick access.
More info here:
http://deanjrobinson.com/artic.....own-menus/
This is really awesome but how can I use this on my Blog?
Honestly the menus on the admin bar is not need in most cases IMHO. It exposes a lot more than you think.
Each plugin, should let us disable/enable its menu – that’s fix the potential problem.
Anyone know how to add submenu links under the blog name?