But my biggest issue with WordPress through its versions is its lack of customisation of the admin panel when you have it hand it over to an inexperienced user. Even when you setup someone up as a Editor they are still inundated with menus and functionality that they will never use.

This is where 3 must have plugins came to use, and allowed me to trailer the admin dashboard to my friends needs.

White Label CMS

The first plugin I discovered was White Label CMS. This plugin allowed me to use my own branding with WordPress, which looks more professional, and removes some of the unnecessary and confusing clutter from the dashboard and the menu system.

This plugin was great because it allowed me to remove all the menus that my friend wouldn’t be using such as the Links Menu and the Tools Menu. It also allowed me to customise the dashboard widgets and hide the ones that my friend wouldn’t be interested.

This is a great plugin that I recommend anyone who uses WordPress for their clients website to download and give it a try.

Download White Label CMS Now

Admin Menu Editor

The Admin Menu Editor plugin is what makes WordPress admin dashboard the most customisable. It lets you manually edit the dashboard menu, you can reorder the menus, show/hide specific items and change access rights.  This allowed me to give my friend the exact menu setup that was suitable for his needs.

Another great feature of this plugin is that you can create custom menus, so you can create menus made up of subpages of your choice. Why should I confuse my friend with loads of menu options when he only needs to use the Posts, Pages and Media menus.

I reckon everyone that wants to give their clients a simple user experience by removing the pointless menus has to give this plugin a go.

Download Admin Menu Editor Now

Capability Manager

Last but far from least is the Capability Manager plugin. One issue I found with WordPress 3.0 was that Editors don’t have the ability to create and manage menus. This is where this plugin comes in handy, in order for someone to access the menus page they need the ability to ‘Edit theme options’ which is not one of the default capabilities of an Editor.

With this plugin you will be able to change the capabilities of any role, add new roles, copy existing roles into new ones, and add new capabilities to existing roles. So I was able to give Editors the ability to ‘Edit theme options’ which gave them access to the menus page.

Download Capability Manger Now

Before and After

Here is the new admin menu that a created using the above plugins. As you can see I have removed all of the menus that an average user wont use and I have also created a custom ‘Menus’ menu to allow editors to create and modify the sites menus.

Now that both of us have found a little more time, the project will be a high priority for us over the next few months. This time round we are planning to develop the website into a community gaming review website, where you the consumer can write you own reviews and thoughts about the games you play.

With out going into too much detail, the plan is to develop the website on the WordPress platform but with a whole lot of custom plug-ins to give us the functionality we desire.

Hopefully we can have a working prototype up and working over the next few months and then start building our community of real gamers and their thoughts on what they play.

I’ll try and keep you updated with the progress and hopefully the WordCamp UK 2009 conference in July will give us some great insight into how we can make the most out of WordPress’s existing functionality.