WP Admin Quicklinks Plugin

Download

This plugin is now hosted in the Plugin Directory at WordPress.org

I’ll keep this page up-to-date regarding updates on it etc, but click the link below to go download it…

• WP-Admin-Quicklinks v1.01

What does it do?

WP Admin Quicklinks is a very simple little WordPress plugin (just install it and it should work – no options to configure) that adds an intelligent, unobtrusive little admin panel to the top-right of all your site’s pages and posts (only once you’ve logged in), giving you shortcuts to the most commonly used WP Admin sections – well, the ones I was always needing to link to anyway.

Currently they are…

• Edit this Post/Page (only shows if you’re on a single post or a page)
• Add new Post
• Dashboard
• Posts
• Pages
• Plugins
• Log out

Do I need it? Aren’t there lots of plugins that do this already?

Yes, there are lots of similar plugins, and as great as most of the ones I tried are,  I found non of them were quite right for me. The two best ones I found were…

• WordPress Admin Bar
• WP Easy Admin

They’re both well made, highly customisable plugins that did the job but they have one thing in common which I personally didn’t like – they both add a big thick admin bar across the top of each page, pushing your own layout down. This was no good for me as I didn’t like the look of a big fat bar on the top of the pages I was working on – it made it harder to visualise how the page would actually look to an end user. It comes down to personal preference.

Functionality wise they are better than my little plugin in that they give direct access to pretty much all the admin pages, but I prefer mine in terms of it’s simplicity and I like the fact that it doesn’t spoil the look and feel or significantly alter the layout of the blog/site I’m working on.

Screenshots

This one shows the WP-Admin-Quicklinks plugin at the top-right of page, installed and running on my site. It shows faded like this until you move the mouse over it.

The admin panel comes into full view as soon as you mouse over it…

If you’re on a Single post or page, the extra shortcut ‘Edit this post/page’ appears…

Same again, just showing it in-situ on a different site, illustrating it just fading away into the background until you need it, not really spoiling the visual layout as you develop and build your site.

Installation

• Download the plugin, unzip it and upload it to your plugins directory – /wp-content/plugins/
• Activate it from the ‘Plugins’ are of the WordPress admin
• That’s it, you’re done

Not working?

This plugin should work with most themes out there. If it doesn’t it’s probably because the theme you’re using doesn’t have the correct template tags in it. WP Admin Quicklinks requires that both the <?php wp_head(); ?> and <?php wp_footer(); ?> template tags are in the theme, usually in the header.php and footer.php respectively. If they’re not there you can try add them yourself, or try contact the theme’s author and ask if they’d be nice enough to update the theme and add them for you.

Changelog

• v1.01 (08/01/2009) – Fix WP2.7 ‘Logout’ link redirect for on the homepage, category and archive pages etc
• v1.00 (07/01/2009) – Initial release

Notes

• I’m no PHP developer, so if there’s a better way of going about this please let me know :)
• Tested and working in WordPress 2.7. It should work in 2.6, maybe even 2.5, but I’ve not tried it. Let me know if there’s any issues.
• In WordPress 2.7 and above it makes use of the new  wp_logout_url template tag and redirects you directly back to the page you logged-out from.
• In WordPress versions < 2.7 it (in theory) adds a a standard wp_loginout().

Background

This is my first plugin for WordPress (so be gentle), and came about because I’ve ended up using WordPress to build a few CMS sites for people recently. I needed a nice easy way to jump to various sections and pages of the admin from front-end pages I was testing etc.

It started off as a bit of code I put in the footer of all the templates I make, and all it does is add a discreet floating admin panel to the top right of each page of your WordPress based site. To make it easier to add it to future sites I looked at a few of the plugins I had installed, saw how to make them write code into the footer automatically, and put this little thing together.

You like it? You like it a lot?

Now, this is entirely up to you, but I’m not going to be unhappy if you click the nice little PayPal button below