I’ve recently begun doing more and more work with WPMU, and one of the hurdles I’ve most encountered is that of customizing the Admin menus. In the scenario I’m working in, clients are given the administrator role for their blog, however, in most scenarios, there are elements that they just don’t need to touch. D. Sader has an excellent Toggle Admin Menus plugin that will cover most of the default Admin pages, however due to some limitations in how the dashboard is tied to widgets, you can’t hide that page from users with that plugin. This is what set me off looking for such a plugin.
I discovered WPlite, which at first glance looked exactly what I wanted. However, due to different permissions issues with roles, it actually wouldn’t block anything for blog admins, which in my case I needed. It also didn’t allow to hide itself, which would have defeated the sole purpose of the plugin. So I did a quick change to hide the menu items from everyone except Site Admins, and allow the blocking of this plugins menu item as well.
As I point out in the Read Me file, this plugin does not physically prevent a user from accessing the page if they normally have permission, it simply hides it in the menu, so if you are using the at a glance widget and want to hide the widgets menu completely, you’ll need to customize this as well. For more stricter control, definitely rely on D. Sader’s plugin, but unsuspecting users not familiar with WP, they will be none the wiser, and you can hide some of the other menu items that might normally appear for blog admins, or others roles for that matter. Note, because I specifically was looking for a way to hide widgets, and didn’t see anything out of the box for Role Manager, I didn’t go that route. For my needs, the combination of this and the Toggle Admin Menu’s I’m completely satisfied with the solution.
Also, currently this plugin must be uploaded to wp-content/plugins, and activated. You can use the built in activate site wide, or use something like Plugin Commander if you are looking for even more control over plugins. Also, this currently requires a site by site configuration, as I wanted more granular control over which blog admins see what. I will eventually look into setting some defaults, possibly via an admin interface, that would be set each time the plugin is active. If anyone wants to help contribute to that effort, I’m all ears.
Any questions or feedback for the WPMU version should be directed towards this post, Muhammad clearly pointed out he doesn’t have time to address the WPMU version. I offered him the changes I had made if he wanted to release a WPMU version himself. That said, all credit for the plugin goes to him, and if you find yourself wanting to donate anything to the development of the plugin, you should seek out the original plugin and show him some love.
This is my first attempt at releasing any kind of WPMU plugin, so certainly, any feedback or suggestions are greatly welcome.
Update So I stumbled upon another plugin similar to WPlite that gives even greater control over customization, which seems to work quite well with WPMU, as you can hide items from Admins and Site Admins are not affected. It still is a plugin that has to be configured on a site by site basis, but as I said, gives a far more granular control over many more elements. I will continue to work on WPlite-MU once I get the current project I’m working on finished, but wanted to share my discovery until then. You can check out the Adminimize plugin at WordPress – Extend. The author’s site is in German, but there are English instructions, and configuration is fairly straight forward for people familiar with WordPress.