Get it All
Together

I just thought I’d write a note about the new Favorite Actions bar in the new version of WordPress. This seems to have been designed as a way to mollify the concerns of the people who used to like the old layout of the administration areas better. But it’s a handy little shortcut to important things and of course, there’s a natural tendency as a plugin developer to want to utilize this space for your own plugin.

In fact, I was looking up how to do this very thing when I happened upon this page. The author cautions, quite rightly, that using this shortcut bar too much will end up clogging the thing and making it useless.

So, it seems to me that the responsible solution for plugin developers who want to make use of this new space would be to make it an option of your plugin which is always disabled by default. Doing so would allow your plugin users to make their own choices about which options to include in the favourites and which to leave as standard options. It is, after all, called a “favorite” actions bar.

In fact, I am hoping that future iterations of the WordPress core will include options to make this bar genuinely customizable according to your own preferences. The combination of a customizable favorites list and optional inclusion of plugin functions would represent the best of all possible worlds for this easily abused space.