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.

To begin with I have to say a huge thank you to Duncan Mackenzie for providing the Xbox Live Data Service which powers the information in this plugin because without his work this plugin wouldn’t be possible.

So heres a brief description on how this plugin works. As I meantion above the plugin pulls in your Gamercard details in from the Xbox Live Data Service using the  PHP DOMDocument::load function. Then using the DOMDocument::getElementsByTagName function it pulls in the sperate pieces of information it requires.

Now that I have all the Gamercard details I then created the new Gamercard using semantic HTML and style it with a seperate CSS file.

Ok so enough of all the techy part, let me talk you through steps of getting this added to your website.

Installation

1. Login to your dashboard and under ‘Plugins’ click ‘Add New’.
2. In the serach box type ‘My Xbox Profile’ and then click ‘Search Plugins’.
3. Find the plugin in the list (should be the first one) and click install on the right hand side.
4. When the lightbox window opens click the red ‘Install Now’ button.
5. Once the installation has finished click ‘Activate Plugin’ next to the ‘Actions’ .

Changing Settings

Now that you have installed the plugin you should now see a ‘My Xbox Profile’ link under the ‘Settings’ tab in your admin dashboard. If you click the link you should see the page below.

Gamertag Details: In this section you need to enter your current Xbox Live Gamertag into the box provided.

Advanced Settings (Optional): There are currently a few additional settings that you can configure, I have listed them below.

• Show Recent Games – You have the ability to show or hide the recent games section on the Gamercard.
• Recent Game Image Size – If you are displaying the recent games then you can have the images in 2 different font sizes. (Please note if you are using the default stylesheet then this setting must be set to 32px)
• Use JQuery – I have added this setting to allow you to remove the JQuery files if you see them duplicated in the head section of your website.

Placing the Gamercard on Your Website

There are two ways in which you can add Gamercard to your website.

In Your Theme (Template Tag)

You have the ability to add the Gamercard to any part of your theme by using the following code:

<?php echo myxboxprofile(); ?>

In Your Post/Page (Shortcode)

If you dont want to add it to your theme then you can add it to any post or page on your website using the shortcode below (without the spaces).

[ myxboxprofile ]

Additional Customisation

Now that you have installed and setup the plugin you will need to customise the Gamercard to fit the style or your website.

Within the plugin folder you will find a folder called ‘CSS’, in this folder you will find a file called ‘myxboxprofile.css’. This is the file that applies the design to your Gamercard once it is place on your website.

I have commented this file so you are free to change the look and feel of your Gamercard to suit your own website.

Conclusion

Im pretty please with this plugin and hopefully it will get used quite a bit, mainly because it is very customisable from a design point of view. I am going to come back to this plugin and develop it a further in the future but I wanted to see if there was much of a demand it first.

I have a few ideas on the direction I would like to take this plugin and here are a few of my ideas for the next version.

• Include the use of templates for differnet layouts of Gamercards
• The ability to create custom templates
• Uterlise more of the information in the Data Service.

If you have any ideas of yourself then please do let me know and I will add the to the feature list.

Hopefully I have explained everything you will need to know about this plugin, but if not then please do leave a comment below.

Download

The download is now available from WordPress.org, please feel free to give it a try.

This plugin came about because for once I couldn’t find a plugin that already had this functionality for WordPress, so I thought it should be a simple plugin to get me going. At present it is very basic, using a template tag below, you can place the chain selects any where on the your page template and then style it using CSS.

chainselect_getcategories();

The plugin also has the ability to pass the category level through, so if you wanted 3 levels of categories to show you could use the template tag as (by default it will always show 2 levels of categories if no value is past):

chainselect_getcategories(3);

I will continue to work on this plugin over time and add new features such as page codes so that you can add the select boxes stright into your posts & pages. In the meantime if there are any plugin developers out there that would like to help me develop this plugin then please do get in touch.

The plugin is now live on WordPress.org and is called Category Ajax Chain Select.

PLEASE BEWARE THIS PLUGIN WILL ONLY WORK IF YOU ARE USING %category% IN YOUR PERMALINK