Featured WordPress Plugin: Ozh Admin Drop Down Menu

There are loads of plugins out there to transform your WordPress website but did you know that there are also lots of plugins out there for transforming your WordPress back end?

This week I’m going to take a look at some plugins that you can use to tweak your admin menu. Installing back end plugins can be a great way to customize your admin area, make it more intuitive and improve productivity. As you’ll see, the admin bar can be greatly improved! If you’re using WordPress as a CMS they’ll also useful for making your CMS work the way that you want it to.

We’ll start the week with a biggie.

Ozh Admin Dropdown menu is a plugin from Ozh (funnily enough!) that changes your left-hand admin sidebar into a dropdown menu at the top of your screen. All of your admin links are turned into a neat CSS dropdown menu, saving on all-important dashboard space. Here it is:

Shiny!

Features

• Customize the admin bar’s color scheme using the color picker
• Three different modes: compact, minimal and compact
• Cute menu items from famfam
• Compatible with handheld devices

Our Mini Review

On his website, Ozh lists “joy and happiness every day” as one of the features. And this plugin does bring quite a bit of joy with it. I often find the WordPress left-hand side menus to be a bit cumbersome. Usually, because I have so many plugins installed that they scroll down off the screen and I have to spend ages looking for things that I want. It’s lovely to have them all at the top of the screen. Another thing that I love about it is that I get so much extra space. I get very frustrated when using the HTML editing post/page window that everything is stuck in that tiny little box. This plugin saves space on the left-hand side so you can have much more room for editing. Love it!

Tags:

• CSS
• admin
• menus