[ad_1] If you are going all in on building sites with the new full-site editing (FSE) experience, then you may have noticed a lack of menu items that will deliver you directly to the tools you need to use. It may be because the Site Editor is still in beta, or because WordPress leadership may still be discussing whether to rename FSE. Perhaps it’s better that users don’t blindly stumble into FSE templates from the main admin menu, but some of these site building features are buried away with no quick access. For example, you are three clicks deep before arriving at Template Parts. Managing reusable blocks is also a tucked away on a separate screen that can be accessed through the post editor but sends you to a new page. If you’re using the block editor, and reusable blocks Do yourself a favor cut and paste this at the end of your website: /wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=wp_block Then bookmark it. — Ben LayerWP & WPDeals.email (@benswrite) October 26, 2022 When LayerWP founder Ben Townsend brought attention to this in a tweet, Roy Sivan responded with a link to a new free plugin that creates quicker access to these menus. Missing Menu Items expands the admin menu with links to reusable blocks, navigation menus, templates, and template parts, so they are all one click away. It adds them to the Appearance menu under the Editor (beta) link: If you are regularly working with Reusable blocks or editing navigation and templates, this plugin will save you some time and help you zip around the editor faster. Missing Menu Items was made by Easily Amused, the creators of Block Styles, a commercial plugin that lets users further customize core blocks with unique styles and boasts “fully responsive block-level design control.” The team will be adding more useful menu links and admin improvements in future releases. Users can contact the development team with menu item requests and they will consider them. Missing Menu Items is available on WordPress.org. Direct support is available for those who have purchased a BlockStyles membership, and community support can be found in the plugin’s forums on the directory. [ad_2] Source link
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Add a Little Pumpkin Spice to Your WordPress Admin This Autumn – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Autumn is my favorite time of the year. On some weekends, I like to drive through my old hometown with the windows rolled down. I crawl through the school zone at 25 mph and breathe in the football field’s freshly cut grass. All those memories of blood, guts, and glory under the Friday night lights flood back. Nervous homecoming dances. Hayrides next to the girl who actually agreed to accompany me for the evening. It is a time of festivals, candied apples, and the lingering heat of an Alabama summer that refuses to fade away. It was always a time of magic and memories, and now it is also the season for pumpkin spice lattes. With a couple of short weeks left before autumn hits, stores and shops are already gearing up for it. Love it or hate it, nearly everything has a pumpkin spice flavor now — even the WordPress admin interface. Ben Byrne, the co-founder of Cornershop Creative, released Pumpkin Spice Admin in the past week. It is a WordPress plugin that brings the sights of the autumn season front and center. Dashboard screen when using Pumpkin Spice Admin. Never let it be said that I am not a fan of the more whimsical WordPress plugins. One of the joys in my life is seeing these creative attempts at throwing a bit of fun into this thing we call the world wide web. Far too often, we focus so much on business deals and technical features that we sometimes forget to stop and enjoy something as beautiful as autumn leaves changing colors. Even if we are not simply running a personal blog, it never hurts to install a fun admin-side theme for our own amusement, unbeknownst to our visitors. Just a little something to brighten our day when we cannot be out and enjoying nature. The biggest downside to the plugin is that it does not rely on the standard WordPress admin color scheme system, which allows each user to select their preferred style. For solo site owners, this is a non-issue. For multi-author websites, it could be problematic if everyone is not on board with the change. I would even consider using it here at WP Tavern, but it might come as a bit of a shock to the rest of the team when they log in. Technically, it is more than a color scheme. It adds a custom font and a falling leaves animation on each admin screen. However, it would be easy to tie those to user preferences. At first, I was somewhat off-put by the leaves falling down on the post-editing screen. It could be an annoyance for some users, but the few that appear, quickly pile at the bottom of the browser window. It is not a continuous animation. Falling leaves on the post-editing screen. The plugin’s font also overrules the post title, but I can live with that. In some ways, I actually prefer it. It does not affect other fonts in the editor. Pumpkin Spice Admin will automatically stop working after the season is over. It sets itself to run only from September through November, so there are no worries if you forget to deactivate it. I only have the plugin running in my test environment, but I am enjoying it for now. All that is missing is a pumpkin-style cursor to complete the look. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingIs It OK To Provide WordPress Admin Credentials to Plugin Support Staff? – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] No. Nada. Nah. Nope. That’s a negative. Under no circumstances. My mama didn’t raise no fool. Heck naw. Not on your life. And, the other thousands of ways to tell anyone asking for site credentials to bugger off, even plugin support staff of a “trusted” WordPress development company. That is my way of saying that I do not trust anyone. Neither should you. However, there are cases where it is necessary to provide admin permissions to a plugin’s support staff. Today’s installment of the Ask the Bartender series comes courtesy of a reader named Niko. Because the entire text is over 1,000 words, I will simply link to the transcript via a .txt file for those who want to read it in full. Here in the post, I will stick to the vital bits. Or at least the parts that I want to address. One of Niko’s Facebook group members kicked the discussion off. ‘Is it okay to send FTP details for a plugin developer to troubleshoot the issue we are having with WooCommerce. We have already provided WordPress Admin credentials.’ This is pretty normal practice in the WordPress world, right? Plugin developers helping out on issues, and if they can’t replicate an issue, they need the access so they can check if it is a plugin issue or a server issue and fix things? Over the years, I have seen this become more of a common practice. However, it is not a practice that I recommend from either the user or developer end. Any site owner should ask whether they trust the person to whom they are giving credentials. If the answer to that question is no, you have the answer to the first question. In over a decade of running a theme and plugin shop, I never needed admin or FTP access to deal with a support question. It did not matter if it was a large and complex plugin or a small one. Because I was the sole person at the company, I also personally answered hundreds of thousands of support questions over the years. Still, not once did I log into a user’s site to help them. That always seemed like a liability issue for me, but I also used such scenarios as teaching moments about trust and security. Users sometimes provided credentials to me without me asking. Often they posted them in plain text in forums, email, or Slack (also, you should never do that). If on-site code needed changing, my users performed the task themselves or installed a bug-free version of the theme/plugin I handed over. If they did not know how to perform a task via the admin, FTP, or otherwise, I took the time to teach them. Yes, that required more energy on both ends, but I believe we were the better for it. More than once, those moments led some users down the path of becoming developers themselves, or it was at least a tiny stepping stone for them. I remain friends with many of them today and am proud that they started with my little solo WordPress shop. Some cases were rougher than others. Many times, I would replicate their setup (plugins, theme, etc.) on my machine. The majority of the time, this led me to the solution — I was using __doing_it_wrong() long before WordPress introduced the idea. In the long run, I was able to pass countless bug fixes upstream to other developers. I made a lot of developer friends this way too. I have no doubts that the road I traveled was the longer of the two. There were times when I spent an hour, two, or even more addressing one user’s needs. Popping into some of their WordPress admins would have been a quicker course. However, my theme and plugin users never needed to worry about whether they trusted me enough to provide that level of access. Plus, I had no chance of accidentally breaking their site by making custom changes. Are there times when a plugin’s support staff really needs access? Probably. The original question was regarding WooCommerce. It is one of the most technically advanced plugins in existence for WordPress. Replicating a user’s setup off-site for it is trickier than most others. There may be rare times when you need to provide some access, but you should never trust anyone. The second part of Niko’s question revolves around the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and user data. It is a vital part of dealing with those times when you decide to hand over the keys to your website. Alright so here comes the issue after we think about GDPR. If this developer happens to be outside the EU, then you would need to anonymize customer data and make an NDA agreement with that exact dev or company that is behind the plugin so they can come around and fix things. I will preface this with the usual I am not a lawyer. However, protecting user data is always a legal and ethical priority on any site you run, regardless of what jurisdiction you fall under. In those — again, rare — cases where you need to provide access to your WordPress admin, there are steps you could take to better protect your site and its data. Regardless of the trustworthiness of a developer or a support staff member, there is always one rule of thumb when dealing with website security: trust no one and trust nothing. The first step should always be having a backup system in place. On the off chance that the support staff breaks something, you will want to revert the site back to its previous state. Never provide complete admin-level access. I recommend installing and activating a role and capability management plugin. This will allow you to create a custom role for support help and limit the areas of the site they have access to. You would then create a user account for them with this
Continue readingToolbelt Tidies WordPress Plugin and Theme Admin Notifications – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] It’s a tale as old as, well, WordPress. Ben Gillbanks noticed a conversation where someone thought that admin notices were getting out of hand. Enter another developer’s attempt to address this problem. With a few code additions to his Toolbelt plugin, he had a working solution to stop the madness: the Tidy Notifications module. Despite the early promise of the WP Notify project last year, it still feels like we are no closer to addressing the overuse of the current admin notice system in WordPress. In reality, it is not so much a system as a hook that developers can use for literally anything. It is the Wild West of the WordPress admin. No rules. No order. And no proper API for standardizing how notices work. WP Notify still exists on GitHub and continues to move along at its own pace, but there is no guarantee that it will ever land in the core platform. Sometimes, the best thing a developer can do is solve the existing problem and hope that WordPress follows along down the road with a better solution. I am already tidying admin notifications with Toolbelt on my development install. My primary use case is to hide the non-dismissible notice from the Gutenberg plugin that I have a Full Site Editing theme installed — is there not a guideline against such notices? I did not suddenly forget that I was using such a theme between the 999th and 1,000th time the reminder appeared on every admin screen of my installation. Notifications expand when clicking on the bell icon in the toolbar. The Tidy Notifications system in Toolbelt neatly tucks all admin notices under a bell icon in the admin toolbar. It also displays the number of notifications. It makes the WordPress admin so clutter-free that I do not know how I have lived without it before. I cannot imagine going back. The only problem with Toolbelt’s solution is that there is no way to distinguish between essential notices and those that should be tucked away. WordPress letting you know that your post was successfully updated is an important notice that should not be hidden. However, a plugin author drumming up five-star reviews, yeah, that should not be front and center. Having two systems would be beneficial. The existing admin_notices hook in WordPress should be used for letting users know the outcome of their actions or actions that they should take. The post editor, which does not use page reloads or make the hook available, has replaced this with the snackbar popup system. These necessary notices have their place. However, WordPress has no built-in system for non-essential notices. This leaves plugin and theme authors with two options: bundle an entirely custom notification apparatus with each extension or just use the admin_notices hook. The latter is the more efficient use of developer resources. Of course, we have had this conversation before. Just shy of a year ago, I wrote a post titled Are Plugin Authors to Blame for the Poor Admin Notices Experience? In the comments, WordPress project lead Matt Mullenweg posited that the solution to unwanted notifications is not to build an inbox, comparing WordPress to cell phones. He said that app store guidelines were likely more impactful to user happiness. In general, I agree with that concept. Setting down a few directory UI and UX rules would not hurt. Given the more recent push to loosen guidelines for the theme directory, that does not seem to be in the cards. Admin notices were not one of the guardrails, the safety net of “must-haves” from the Themes Team. The admin notice spam WordPress users see today most commonly comes from plugins and not themes. Why? It is not because theme authors care more about user happiness levels. It is because the theme review guidelines over the years have been strict. Anything too flamboyant gets the hammer. The WordPress Themes Team even has a custom guideline-friendly, drop-in class that themers can use. The plugin and theme directories have taken far different stances on admin notices, and it shows. When the Themes Team moves to minimal checks, there may not be anything to stop themers from competing for the most obnoxious admin notice award. Game on, plugin authors. “Unwanted” notifications may even be the wrong terminology. Often, they are “unwanted right now.” Sometimes, folks might want to read a message — just later. I am still holding out hope that we will have a notifications/messages inbox in WordPress one day. One that is entirely controlled by the user. Until then, I may just stick with the Tidy Notifications module in Toolbelt. There are many other handy components in it too. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
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