Maestro: The Inline Admin Menu Editor

Description

Maestro is an inline admin menu editor. Instead of a separate settings
screen, it turns the WordPress admin menu into something you edit in place —
right where it lives. Toggle Edit Menu from the admin bar and the menu
becomes editable: click a label to rename it, drag rows to reorder, swap a
top-level icon, or hide items from chosen roles.

Try it first. Launch a throwaway demo in
WordPress Playground
— it boots a site with Maestro active, User Switching, and test users (editor,
author, contributor, subscriber; password password) so you can try per-role
visibility by switching users before you install anything.

What you can do

• Rename any top-level or submenu item — just click the label.
• Reorder items by dragging (top-level items among themselves, submenu items
  within their parent), or with the keyboard (Alt+Arrow).
• Swap icons on top-level items. The picker offers dashicons and bundled
  Bootstrap Icons with search, and accepts any of WordPress’s four native icon
  forms (dashicon, “none”, base64 image data-URI, or an image URL).
• Hide items from chosen roles — including administrators. Custom roles
  registered by other plugins
  (User Role Editor,
  Members, etc.) appear automatically.
• Reset a single item to its WordPress default, or reset everything at once.

Changes are global — one configuration applies to everyone — and are stored
as a sparse delta layered over the menu WordPress builds on each load. Nothing
is rebuilt or duplicated, so a reset simply removes the delta and the original
menu returns.

Important: visibility is cosmetic, not access control

Hiding a menu item only declutters the menu. The underlying admin page still
loads for anyone who knows or types its URL, because a page’s own registered
capability is the true lock. Maestro operates on the menu (presentation),
which is a different plane from authorization.

If you need to actually prevent access, pair Maestro with a capability manager:

• User Role Editor — the
  simplest way to edit what a role can do.
• PublishPress Capabilities —
  menu-aware; its Pro tier can block admin pages by URL.

The maestro_capability filter lets such a plugin hand editing rights to a
custom capability instead of the default manage_options.

Accessibility and localization

The editor is keyboard-operable end to end — select with Enter/Space,
reorder with Alt+Arrow, and every move and save is announced to screen
readers. Modified items carry a non-color indicator with screen-reader text, so
state never depends on color alone.

Maestro uses the maestro-menu-editor text domain and ships a translation
template plus starter language packs for Spanish (es_ES), German (de_DE),
Japanese (ja), French (fr_FR), Portuguese – Brazil (pt_BR), and Italian
(it_IT). WordPress.org language packs override and extend these; native-speaker
and WordPress Polyglots review is welcome.

Architecture (for developers)

• Config — reads/writes/sanitizes a single option (maestro_config) holding only
  the deltas. Reset = delete the option; the natural menu returns automatically.
• Replay — on a late admin_menu pass, applies rename/icon/visibility to the
  $menu/$submenu globals and reorders submenus. Top-level order uses the
  core custom_menu_order + menu_order filters. Resilient to missing slugs
  (orphans are skipped) and new items (appended at the end).
• Rest — maestro/v1/config (GET/POST/DELETE), capability-gated, X-WP-Nonce.
• The editor JS is driven by a localized model (with DOM ids), not DOM scraping,
  and diffs against captured pristine defaults so the stored config stays sparse.
• Localized editor labels are passed from PHP to JavaScript in maestroData.i18n;
  the runtime zip includes the bundled POT template and starter catalogs.

Known limits / deferred to v2

• Reparenting (moving an item between a top-level position and a submenu) is
  not included. Top-level items reorder among top-level items and submenu items
  reorder within their current parent. Reparenting needs hand-splicing of the
  globals plus parent_file/submenu_file highlighting fixes — a known
  minefield, parked deliberately.
• Separators are preserved in place but not yet add/move/delete-able; their
  generated slugs (separator1…) have no stable identity to key against.
• Renaming an item drops any core-appended count badge (e.g. pending
  comments) from that label, since the badge lives inside the title string.
• Submenu sort relies on items registering by the late admin_menu pass; a
  plugin that registers submenus on an unusually late hook may not be captured.

Credits

Bundled Bootstrap Icons are © The Bootstrap
Authors, licensed under the MIT License. They are recoloured to the WordPress
menu grey and embedded as data-URIs; see bin/generate-bootstrap-icons.mjs.