Josh, I really appreciate your plugin and I donated to it. However when you make changes that ruin half of our previous settings, it’s really heavy, especially for those who maintain many websites, even more when it’s multisite multilingual sites (one sub-site per language).
This happened to me just now with update to version 4.6. I wouldn’t mind redoing my plugins’ settings on every website for a valuable change but honestly, I don’t really care if UTmce is a main tab or under the tab “Settings” or if the setting page is organized differently.
I rrepeat: I do appreciate your plugin a lot but I’ve just spent one hour redoing the settings of it on different sites and it got to my nerves…
First – Thank you so much for your kind words. I do really appreciate!
Second – I completely understand your frustration. Believe me, I have to change them on all my client sites as well. It is only done as an extreme last resort.
Honestly… it didn’t make sense to have two groups of buttons. I did it at first to ease navigation. But, it simply got too long. So, consolidating them into a single tab seemed the most logical.
I plan to move my development efforts towards the PRO version.. and leave this one as it stands. We will continue to monitor the support threads, as well as update the plugin to keep it compatible with future versions of WP.
But, as far as new features, enhancements, and other changes… will only be done to the PRO version. So, I don’t anticipate that this issue will ever happen again with the lite version.
I am sorry. I do understand it is a laborious task to have to go back and re-configure settings. My sincerest apologies.
No.. thank you! It is users like you who have made this plugin what it is today! From everyones feedback.. I have managed to please about 90% of the masses 😉 That’s pretty impressive in my book!
As always, please feel free to contact me personally if you were to ever experience any issues in the future.
Thank you for being such an understanding user!
(I am going to mark this as resolved… if you feel differently, please change it back 🙂
no no, you don’t get away like that: releasing version 4.6, finally “polluting” the admin menu with a totally sticky top level page and then saying to us: “changes… will only be done to the PRO version” from now on. Not like that.
Please monsieur, move that settings menu item back to were it was OR at least code it “the right way”, so that people can move it to a place they think it belongs in their setup – using things like the Admin Menu Editor plugin (http://wordpress.org/plugins/admin-menu-editor/) for instance.
But the way it is done now, the menu item is not movable (any more) and acts like it belongs to the default WordPress menu – and we know it is not.
Please redeem us from this impertinence.
Thank you!
Please deactivate and delete your currently installed version. Then, re-download a fresh copy from the WP repo.
This will address the menu item “sticky”.
I sense a note of sarcasm in your message, as if it was intentional. It is reasons like that which have caused me to move away from the free version… and focus on Pro.
concerning sarcasm: well, I tried to be funny in this situation, but it must have blended with my anger and frustration about this (ok, maybe this even IS the definitition of sarcasm ^^). I’m sorry.
But it seems I don’t understand your answer: I updated to version 4.6 yesterday. Today I (deactivated it and deleted it and) downloaded version 4.6 again and uploaded it via FTP. After activation, there is nothing changed: we have a toplevel page which can’t be deleted (at least via a menu item manager). It always “regenerates” itself. So it seems, that there is no “new” version 4.6 where the sticky problem is adressed, as you said.
Did I miss something?
For now I just edited the code: where “add_menu_page” was, I changed it to “add_options_page”, like it was in version 4.5.
Perhaps I didn’t understand exactly what you were describing. I have to head out the door for job #2.. but I’ll take a closer look at this as soon as I get back home. I certainly don’t want the menu page behaving “intrusively”.
I’ll post back here again later today with my findings.
Okay, I’ve double-checked against the codex and the page is being registered properly. I don’t include a numerical value in the argument, because when I did, it was overwriting other plugins menu items using the same number.
So, what is the plugin you are using to “manage” the menu items? I’ll have to download it and test it myself.
In the meantime, it seems that I’ve learned that all toplevel page item are not allowed to be “managed away” in WordPress – they recreate themselves everytime.
It is only possible (1) to create a top level menu item by hand or (2) to create a sub menu item or (3) to delete, = “manage away”, a sub menu item. It is not possible to “manage away” a menu item that is registered as a toplevel page in the code.
At least not with “Admin Menu Editor” – but I dare to say, that it is not possible with any of these menu plugins, because it’s a WordPress standard.
So there we have it: another reason why I don’t like plugins that create toplevel menu items. ^^ There are a lot of them out there which act like that. Most of the time it is totally unneccessary to have them as a toplevel menu item, because the provided functionality isn’t that crucial to have it “always available for blitz access”.
Ultimate TinyMCE is one of them. So I encourage you, for the sake of usability, not to define it as a toplevel menu item, but leave it where it belongs and where it was ever since: as a settings submenu.
Also a thing I noticed so far: some toplevel menu items are sometimes hard to manage in dependency of the user role/right. They act a bit quirky, I don’t know why yet. And as I see it, it is crucial for site managers to keep the admin menu lean for lower user roles. They must not have access to some menu items. We need to be able to “manage them away” under all circumstances; or sooner or later crap will happen because of this – we all know how the cookie crumbles with customers or just “users” some times … Don’t give them too much possibilities. 😉
Ahhh… so the reason it worked before was because it was a sub-level page under the “Settings” tab? And now, since it’s top-level.. it can’t be manipulated?
Good to know! Thanks!!
When I get around to updating the free version… I’ll write an option which will allow the user to customize where the menu page is displayed.
I have seen one other plugin do this.. and I wonder if you were the one who prompted him to include the option to move the page to another area 😉
Also, thank you for the “lesson”. I didn’t know that was standard WP behavior with menu location. I appreciate the knowledge 🙂
Wow, an in-plugin option to set the position of the menu item – this is something new; I personally never saw that before, but sounds great!
And as far as I can remember, until now I never encouraged another developer to place his plugins menu item somewhere else. But always good to know, that there are also other people out there who care. 😉
Ok, glad it helped to gain insights for all of us! Looking forward to this new version having that menu position feature included.
(Btw: the new “beatification” of the table cell in the active plugin list also is very “advertising”, not to say “intrusive”. ^^)
Thanks for posting back! Our original topic is still on my mind. I have been so busy with a personal project.. I haven’t had time to crack open this plugin again. But I will be doing it VERY soon.
Lemme ask you this…
1. Do you like my original idea?
2. If so.. where would be the places you would offer as options to move the menu item?
3. If not.. then could I still get your feedback anyway.. lol.
Thanks, kindly!!
And thanks for posting a helpful solution for others’ who want to do the same thing!
Sure, an option to select where the menue item of a plugin should appear seems great! Sometimes I think it is maybe overdoing it, but giving the user the flexibility to decide whether it should appear in Settings, Tools, Appearance or as a top level item can become very handy.
The ‘place to be’ for such an option itself would of course be in the Admin Options tab of your plugin – if you ask me. (Oh … you do! ^^)
Another suggestion for a big improvement which comes to my mind is:
for these little icons/button, you should try to use sprites instead of single image files. Imagine I have 20 buttons set up with Ultimate TinyMCE, so I have 20 additional HTTP requests when the editor is loaded. With a sprite, there would be only one. It’s quite a performace boost.
And if you use Sass with Compass for development, the generation of sprites is flexible, quick and easy. Little demo of such a workflow:
