Admin Menu Editor vs Global Meta Box Order

Admin Menu Editor lets you manually edit the Dashboard menu. You can reorder the menus, show/hide specific items, change permissions, and more. Features Change menu titles, URLs, icons, CSS classes and so on. Organize menu items via drag & drop. Change menu permissions by setting the required capability or role. Move a menu item to a different submenu. Create custom menus that point to any part of the Dashboard or an external URL. Hide/show any menu or menu item. A hidden menu is invisible to all users, including administrators. The Pro version lets you set per-role menu permissions, hide a menu from everyone except a specific user, export your admin menu, drag items between menu levels, make menus open in a new window and more. Try online demo. Additional Features Despite the name, this plugin is not limited to just editing the admin menu. You can also: Create login redirects and logout redirects. Allow/deny access to specific posts based on user roles. Hide plugins on the Plugins -> Installed Plugins page from other users. Edit the display name, description, and other plugin details shown on the Plugins -> Installed Plugins page (e.g. for white-labelling). Shortcodes The plugin provides a few utility shortcodes. These are mainly intended to help with creating login/logout redirects, but you can also use them in posts and pages. [ame-wp-admin] – URL of the WordPress dashboard (with a trailing slash). [ame-home-url] – Site URL. Usually, this is the same as the URL in the “Site Address” field in Settings -> General. [ame-user-info field="..."] – Information about the logged-in user. Parameters: field – The part of user profile to display. Supported fields include: ID, user_login, display_name, locale, user_nicename, user_url, and so on. placeholder – Optional. Text that will be shown if the visitor is not logged in. encoding – Optional. How to encode or escape the output. This is useful if you want to use the shortcode in your own HTML or JS code. Supported values: auto (default), html, attr, js, none. Notes If you delete any of the default menus they will reappear after saving. This is by design. To get rid of a menu for good, either hide it or change it’s access permissions. In the free version, it’s not possible to give a role access to a menu item that it couldn’t see before. You can only restrict menu access further. In case of emergency, you can reset the menu configuration back to the default by going to http://example.com/wp-admin/?reset_admin_menu=1 (replace example.com with your site URL). You must be logged in as an Administrator to do this.

Intuitively harmonize meta box positions and screen column layout for all backend users of your WordPress installation. Quick Overview Install and activate the plugin Switch to a post, a page, a custom post type, or the dashboard Change the order and position of a meta box (or all of them) Change the column layout Switch to a different user (maybe with the help of the User Switching plugin) See your changes applied Installation Download and unpack, then move the folder ‘global-meta-box-order’ into your ‘plugins’ folder. Head over to your WordPress installation and activate the plugin in the admin area. Rollback The plugin doesn’t write anything to the database, it just reads. So it never touches any user settings, but instead filters them on a per request basis. Though all applied changes appear to be permanent from a user’s perspective, they are not. Just deactivate the plugin and see all changes disappear. Activate it again, and they will all be reapplied. How It Works The plugin operates on a blueprint user whose screen settings for meta boxes (visibility, position and ordering), and column layout are cloned for all other backend users on the fly. By default, this blueprint user is the first admin user found, so you’ll need to be logged in as that user to globally change screen settings. For how to change the default blueprint user as well as other settings, please refer to the Configuration section below. Where It Works By default, the plugin kicks in when a user: edits a post edits a page edits a custom post type hits the dashboard What It Changes It will always change the meta boxes visibility, ordering, and column positions the column layout When told so, it will also remove the screen options box immobilize all boxes, so they can’t be moved around by your users anymore Usage Log in as your blueprint user. By default, the is the first admin user found in your system. Select an editing screen (post, page, custom post type) or the dashboard, move the meta boxes around, change their screen settings and the screen’s column layout. Switch to some user to review your settings, switch back to adjust them. When done, you might want to lock your views down by removing the screen options box and by locking the boxes’ sort order. Your blueprint user, of course, wil not be affected by this. Configuration The backend integration is kept to a minimum. No navigation entry, no options page, no entry in the database. Instead, the place to go to configure the plugin is your theme’s functions.php. By the way: You don’t need to configure the plugin. As long as it finds an admin user, it will work just fine. Preparation Fire up an editor, load your functions.php, and copy and paste the following code into it. The idea is to have some sort of container to do the configuration in, but do it any way you like. For brevity, we’ll assume the plugin is loaded and active, so we won’t check for that (see this nice write-up on QueryLoop on some ways to do it, though). if (is_admin()) { // The path to the configuation is rather long, so let's // make us a shorthand. class_alias('\GlobalMetaBoxOrder\Config', 'MetaBoxConfig'); // Add MetaBoxConfig below this line ... } Now we are ready to add some of the configuration settings below to adjust the plugin’s default behaviour. You might also want to have a look at the example configuration near the end of this document. Please keep in mind that you need to be logged in as any user but your blueprint user to see a setting applied. Again, the User Switching plugin might come in handy. Screens To Operate On By default, the plugin operates on the post, page, and custom post type editing screens, and the dashboard. You can change this as follows: // Operate on post and page screens only, leave the dashboard alone. // This will still include custom post types. MetaBoxConfig::$filter = array('post', 'page'); // Exclude custom post types MetaBoxConfig::$include_cpts = false; // Allow custom post types... MetaBoxConfig::$include_cpts = true; // ...but not all of them MetaBoxConfig::$exclude = array('acme_product'); MetaBoxConfig in the example above is assumed to be an alias to \GlobalMetaBoxOrder\Config as shown in the preparation section above. Changing the Blueprint User Register a function that returns a user id, like so: MetaBoxConfig::$getBlueprintUserId = function () { return 1; }; Or, more involved: MetaBoxConfig::$getBlueprintUserId = function () { $user = get_user_by('slug', 'jane'); return $user ? $user->ID : false; }; MetaBoxConfig in the example above is assumed to be an alias to \GlobalMetaBoxOrder\Config as shown in the preparation section above. Locking Views By default, all users will be able to interact with the screen options box, and to move around the meta boxes themselves. There is a rationale behind it, but to cut things short, this is how you might want to change it: // No screen options MetaBoxConfig::$remove_screen_options = true; // Meta boxes can't be moved anymore MetaBoxConfig::$lock_meta_box_order = true; MetaBoxConfig in the example above is assumed to be an alias to \GlobalMetaBoxOrder\Config as shown in the preparation section above. Example Configuration if (is_admin()) { // Make sure plugin is active if (class_exists('\GlobalMetaBoxOrder\Config')) { // Make a long name short. class_alias('\GlobalMetaBoxOrder\Config', 'MetaBoxConfig'); // Settings MetaBoxConfig::$filter = array('post', 'page', 'dashboard'); // default MetaBoxConfig::$include_cpts = true; // default MetaBoxConfig::$getBlueprintUserId = function () { return 1; }; MetaBoxConfig::$exclude = array('acme_product'); MetaBoxConfig::$remove_screen_options = true; MetaBoxConfig::$lock_meta_box_order = true; } } On Moving the WYSIWYG Editor The position of WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor is fixed, and can’t be changed out of the box (mostly because it lacks a box around it). There are reasons for this, but if you want to have a positionable editor anyway, you might want to have a look at our very own Movable Editor plugin. If, on the other hand, if you want to place one specific box above the editor, you might want to check out this answer on stackexchange.