I’ve just installed a few WordPress plugins to customise the admin interface. You won’t see the changes as a reader so I’m gonna blab on about them.
Lighter Menus has given me back some of that wasted space that appeared in version 2.6. Compare these two screenshots before and after installing it. You can’t see it with a screenshot but mouseing over those menus at the top produces drop-down menus containing the child menu items. The layout is still far from optimal, but its a huge improvement. If I had the time (and patience) I’d write my own plugin to clean it up even more. Maybe one day. This plugin also reduces the number of clicks required to get to any section of the admin interface from 2 to 1.
Dashboard: Draft Posts lists your draft posts on the WP dashboard. Assuming you start from the dashboard page, this reduces the number of clicks needed to edit a draft from 3 to 1, which is significant especially when you consider loading time. As editing drafts is something I do quite regularly, this is an absolute godsend. However, the dashboard is still filled with much bloat which pushes the Draft Posts widget down the page, requiring scrolling.
Dashboard Widget Manager lets you easily add, remove and reorder the dashboard widgets. I got rid of everything except Draft Posts, Recent Comments and Incoming Links. The relentless WordPress propaganda, I do not need.
If you’re a regular WordPress user I highly recommend these plugins.
While we’re on the subject, if you’ve tried unsuccessfully to use the WordPress plugin auto update feature and get the error “Could not create temporary file” you need to set the permissions on your wp-content folder to 777. Not a very “best practice” solution, I know. But it beats the old tedium of downloading over FTP then uploading.
