• Resolved Simon Blackbourn

    (@lumpysimon)


    Hi

    This is a great plugin that I have used for several years on 50+ sites, but the new version has one very annoying ‘feature’, which is the positioning of the admin menu item near the very top of the admin menu (between Dashboard and Posts).

    I feel this is a very bad habit for plugins to get into, as before you know it they will all be at it and my posts and pages menu items will be shunted halfway down the screen. Mark Jaquith has resorted to releasing a ‘Menu Humility’ plugin to stop this happening: http://wordpress.org/plugins/menu-humility/.

    Nine times out of ten I am logging in to my website to add or update content, not to change plugin settings, so I would appreciate it if you could remove the position attribute from add_menu_page to move the menu down to the bottom, which I think is a much more appropriate position.

    Interested to hear your thoughts on this.

    Thanks very much
    Simon

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 26 total)
  • Strongly agree with what Simon says here.

    It’s a great plugin, but this sort of pushy menu behaviour needs to be discouraged, as does deliberately colouring your icon when the de-facto standard is white.

    Stop subverting the visual design hierarchy, please!

    Fully agree. One look at my admin menu and you’ll agree: https://cloudup.com/cWJkixz5vzT. Either put it next to your SEO plugin or move it back under the Tools or Settings.

    With that enabled the two Yoast plugins are still out of order: https://cloudup.com/cGOdp1KpynA.

    +1 on the menu position.

    Also +1 on using an icon that fits the visual design. Even Jetpack plays nice in this regard. 😉

    Thread Starter Simon Blackbourn

    (@lumpysimon)

    Hi Pippin

    I linked to Mark’s plugin in my original post, but my point is that users shouldn’t be forced into installing a second plugin to stop a plugin hijacking the menu.

    Plugins should use the default positions, then if a user wants to change their menus around they can install a plugin to allow them to do this.

    Oops, missed that 🙂

    I fully agree on the default humility.

    +1 on this as well. I think at the very least, it would be nice to have a checkbox in /wp-admin/admin.php?page=yst_ga_settings#top#advanced to simplify the admin menu, to simply move the “Settings” link itself back under the /wp-admin/options-general.php and hide the Dashboard & Extensions pages?

    You don’t need an extra plugin to fix this. Edit Line 198 in the file ..\plugins\google-analytics-for-wordpress\admin\class-admin.php. It starts with “add_menu_page“. The last part of it before the closing parenthesis is the number that sets the menu position. In mine (and likely yours as well) it was 2.00013467543. Change the “2” to “99” (leave the decimal and everything else- it needs to be a ‘unique’ number), save the file, and refresh your admin page. Analytics should now be right above SEO.

    +1 here too. It needs to AT LEAST be under the default WordPress tools, like under ‘Comments’ if not even lower.

    However, I disagree with the comment about about color. I strongly-dislike these new ‘flat’ and ‘black and white’ trends in interface design, which undo years of UI advancement. Position, color, shape, etc. are all quite important to quickly recognizing things and using an interface.

    And, thanks for the work-around Foxwander, but hopefully Yoast will change it in the source.

    However, I disagree with the comment about about color. I strongly-dislike these new ‘flat’ and ‘black and white’ trends in interface design, which undo years of UI advancement. Position, color, shape, etc. are all quite important to quickly recognizing things and using an interface.

    @stevew928: In the context of design trends I do agree with you, but that’s for a wider discussion (incidentally, SVG was proposed as a possible solution, which would allow custom CSS colouring of icons). However, if the designers of WordPress’s UI have decided that the admin icons should be monochrome, which it very much appears they have, then plugin designers need to respect that, otherwise it just becomes a mess of mismatched icons – I’m looking at you, too, WPTouch – all competing for visual attention in an admin interface that should encourage quiet focus. WordPress does use colour in the admin interface, but only sparingly, reserving it for important things like update notifications.

    Look at Austin Ginder’s screenshot. You honestly believe that the Yoast icon’s use of colour there is totally fine? Because in exactly the same way as menus “jumping the queue” is a subversion of the design’s hierarchy, so is the use of colour in the Admin UI when everything else is mono. It screams “look at ME! Look at ME!” in a desperate attempt to pull the user’s eye away from the design order and shows a distinct lack of respect of the user’s attention. It is not a good thing.

    Yep, lose the color and the position it’s just too much.

    Stuff like this should be written into plugin rules. No color, no jumping out of settings or tools.

    Agreed.

    Stick to the default colours, settings and position.

    Move the menu entry down (unless you are expecting us to need to click it often?? )

    Even worse, clicking the mal-placed menu item doesn’t give you anything useful!! You have to click again to get to anything of use.

    Put it under tools, where it belongs. This plugin is not unique enough to put up with such arrogance. Planning on replacing it on my dozen or so sites for this foolishness.

    Completely agree with this.

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 26 total)
  • The topic ‘Admin menu humility’ is closed to new replies.