A Seacoast NH WordPress Developers Meetup took place on May 7, 2014 and Amanda Giles gave a presentation on some simple tricks to customize and improve the WordPress Admin pages. Thanks to Alpha Loft in Portsmouth, NH for providing our venue.
The meeting was well attended with 10 WordPress developers. Brief introductions from around the table spurred a conversation about the best WordPress plugin to use for backups. BackupBuddy and UpdraftPlus were recommended, but we all agreed the wide variety of client server configurations made consistency a challenge for backup plugins.
Tonight’s presentation was very PHP code-based and Amanda dove right in with some working demos. The functions.php file and other data can be found on our Meetup page.
Amanda covered the following topics
- Hiding the Admin Bar on the live site
- Adding sort-able meta_key columns to Admin Edit pages for custom post types
- Creating a custom footer in the Admin e.g. a link to the web developer’s site.
- Adding a Filter to Admin pages for a custom taxonomy
- Customizing the Login page colors, logos, and URLs.
- Add the front end site’s CSS to the Admin Page/Post Editor for true WYSIWYG
- Adding a Google Font the Admin Page/Post Editor for true WYSIWYG
- Adding custom CSS styles to the TinyMCE editor
- Creating a data widget for the Admin Dashboard page
- Adding a custom link to the Admin bar for quick access to an admin tool
- Adding a shortcode to protect client email from spambots
All in all, an impressive bag of tricks put together by an experienced WordPress developer. The code was well presented and worked in a live code environment. Well done Amanda!
Next month’s Seacoast NH WordPress Developers Meetup will be about using a PHP debugger in a WordPress environment, when echo statements or print_r() aren’t enough to find the coding problem.