13 Great WordPress Plugins To Power Up Your Admin Area
103WordPress plugins are a great way to enhance and optimize your blog. In addition to adding more features to your actual blog, there are also a lot of plugins that can give you more control and power over the wordpress admin area.
Using these plugins you can do everything from hiding unnecessary elements to customizing the look of your admin area.
1. Admin Management Extended:
Traditionally, you would have to open a page/post to edit any properties. This plugin adds certain icons to the Manage post/page view so you can make changes without having to open the edit screen. You can change post/page title, edit post slug and change publication date with a neat pop-out calendar.
This plugin also allows you to toggle post/page visibility, toggle comment status open/close, changing page order with drag and drop, inline category and tag management, hiding draft posts and a lot of other functions that would otherwise need you to go through a number of hierarchical clicks.
Download this plugin here.
2. Pop Menus For WP Admin:
How would you like pop-up menus for all the WordPress admin features? You can get them with this plugin and speed up your admin area navigation. It adds a pop-up sub-menu to the main WP menu items in your left sidebar and works even when the menu is collapsed. So, no need to collapse or hide the menu items anymore to save space since the plugin takes care of that automatically.
This plugin is based on jQuery and CSS and can be downloaded here.
3. Ozh Admin Drop Down Menu:
This plugin makes you super productive by bringing all the admin links to a neat drop down menu. No need to go through multiple hierarchies any more, now you can jump to any admin page by selecting it from a CSS driven drop down menu.
In addition to smoother navigation, this plugin also saves you a lot of screen real state and makes your admin area simpler. You can further customize this plugin by switching on/off the header, choosing a color scheme, display/hide icons in the drop down menus and a number of other tweaks that would let you create a compact admin area.
Download this plugin here.
4. Simply Tags:
Get more out of tags with this plugin. It allows you to mass edit tags for a large number of posts, offers an auto-completion feature for entering tags and displays quick tags that you can click to select. The plugin also offers an auto-tagging feature where some tags are automatically entered based on the keywords in your post.
This plugin is specially useful if you want to add, rename or delete tags from a large number of posts. Imagine renaming a tag in hundreds of posts without this plugin, it would literally take hours. Whereas, with Simple Tags it takes less than a minute.
Download it here.
5. Pre-publish Reminders:
A simple plugin that displays reminder items you should consider before publishing. You can put a check-box against each item and check it off as you complete. These reminders are displayed on the write post page. Specially useful if you are running a multi-author blog and people tend to forget one thing or another. Moreover, you can also customize the text color and background to make the reminders more prominent. All these settings can be handled from an administration panel under the Manage Posts section.
Download this plugin here.
6. WordPress Tweaks Plugin:
A simple yet powerful plugin to control the admin area of your blog. Offers various tweaks including turning off auto-complete for tags, disabling flash uploader, disabling self-pinging , disabling the dashboard and setting various SEO and security options to further optimize your blog . You can also use the plugin to control the nofollow options for your blog.
Download this plugin here.
7. Adminimize:
Adminize lets you get more out of the admin area by visually compressing and hiding many items. You can hide unnecessary items from the main menu, the sub menu and even the dashboard. You can move the dashboard to the menu or even remove it completely from the back-end. Different settings can be selected for different users based on the requirements. All input fields can be scrolled so you don’t need to make them bigger. The plugin also offers various features for tweaking the write page, the media, links and even the plugins.
It is probably one of the most comprehensive admin area plugins that give you complete control over your blog settings.
You can download this plugin here.
8. WordPress Admin Bar:
Gives you an admin bar similar to WordPress.com. You can access the admin features of your blog without going to the dashboard. Simply access the desired feature from any page of your blog, as long as you are logged in as the admin. You can display or hide any of the menu options to make it more productive.
You can get the Admin Bar plugin here.
9. Easy Admin Color Schemes:
Customize the colors of your admin interface with this plugin. You can switch between various color schemes without editing a single line of CSS. You can even add or import your own color schemes and the plugin would generate a stylesheet for it. These color schemes can also be previewed, copied and exported to use with a different blog.
While creating a color scheme, all you have to do is choose 4 primary colors from a color chart and the CSS would be edited accordingly. If you like an existing scheme but want to change a couple of colors, you can do so by editing the scheme and choosing new colors.
Download this plugin here.
10. WordPress Admin Quick Menu:
This plugin adds quick menu items to your wordpress sidebar. Using this, you can access external pages like analytics and shopping carts from within your admin area. It works by adding a new menu to the left side of your control panel where you can add links to various internal and external pages.
To add new item, you simply need to provide the URL of the webpage and give it a menu title. You can also adjust the security level of each menu option for different user-roles.
Download it here.
11. Admin Expert Mode:
Are you tired of the inline documentation included on the admin pages? If you have been blogging for a while you no longer need paragraphs explaining to you what are Excerpts or TrackBacks. If you are familiar with all the different features of wordpress, this plugin can remove the verbose description and text included with different fields.
For example, this is how the write post area usually looks, with inline descriptions for various features.
However, using this plugin has removed all the descriptions and cleaned up the space.
It does NOT remove field labels, section headers or anything containing actual data. Moreover, after you have activated this plugin, every user must go to their profile to enable expert mode.
Download this plugin here.
12. WordPress Admin Notepad:
This plugin creates a simple notepad in your admin area that you can use to save notes. You can hide/show the notepad with a single button and have different permission settings for each user role. It is a good tool to have if you often jot down things related to your blog.
Download the notepad plugin here.
13. Admin Trim Interface:
This plugin allows you to trim the interface by removing certain elements. You can remove different elements including the visit site button, the dashboard link, the “howdy” greeting, the wordpress version from the footer e.t.c. Each element has to be selected manually in order to be removed. However, all these changes are global and would effect all users.
Download this plugin here.
Have you used any plugins on your admin area? What about any of the above?
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I was looking for something like Adminimize for a client and it was looking like I would have to hack together Role Scoper and Capability Manager. Thanks for saving me several hours. Easy Admin Color Schemes looks nice for client sites as well.
Nice list.
Do you know any plugins that amp up the search for pages in admin? My site has tons of pages and most of the time when I search for a page to edit it, even if I use part of the title, the admin page search doesn’t find it.
yes i know about plugins
Great list.
Think you actually did a good job remembering the best admin plugins.
Thanks for listing my “Admin Management Extended” plugin. :)
We sometimes forget that as Admins, we need plugins too. Thanks for reminding us!
Those are some useful looking plugins. I especially like that Simply Tags one. I’m gonna have to check it out.
These look great, especially the one about coloring the administration area. The color scheme now is pretty boring, and I’d love to highlight certain areas over others. Thanks; great find.
Quite a few things I’m definitely going to use that I never thought of before. Thanks for the roundup.
Great job at listing some of the best admin plugins for wordpress.
The pre publish plugin could be really interesting with copywriters that need to be reminded by the developer with some tips.
This is brilliant. Some of them are really handy and will try them out at some point! Thanks for sharing!
Where’s the Fluency Admin plugin love? http://deanjrobinson.com/projects/fluency-admin/
I think SOME of these would be useful when setting up a client interface. Thanks!
Some of these would just annoy me. :)
great list of plug-ins and options to try!
Great article. I didn’t know about half of these plugins. Thanks a bunch!
Very nice collection! Saved in the vault.
I wrote a quick little plugin a few months ago that lets you change the number of posts displayed in your Edit Posts screen:
http://www.davidgagne.net/2009/07/01/wordpress-wednesday-admin-lists/
Very, very thanks.
It is very useful.
Great collection, very useful, thanks…
Thanks for this post. I am just beginning to set-up a WP blog for my website.
Very appreciated.
cool collection
Thank so much so much !
I am definitely going to use the Admin dropdown. Awesome, list!
No mention of the Fluency admin plugin. Has to be one of the best things you can install to improve working in the Admin area of WordPress.
Some really handy admin applications there, thank you for bringing them all together.
Great collections of useful wordpress plugin..
I like several of them, and going to try few of them…
Regards,
Synergy Informatics
That’s an excellent collection of plugins – many of which I’ve never heard of. Kudos for putting so many good ones in one place!
I am always looking for great ways to make my blogging more efficient, not to mention fun, thank you for pulling this list together.
Greatlist!
About: 5. Pre-publish Reminders:
Shame there is no plugin which actually checks the wordcount.
I’m looking for something to set a minimum wordcount, before the publish button is available.
That does stink – wordcount is pretty much as basic as it gets – I can’t believe WordPress forgot to add it. While they’re already working on basic image editing, they don’t even have wordcount? Ironic.
they do have wordcount.
But what i’m looking for is an option to set a minimum (or max) wordcount before the publish button comes available. =)
Pretty neat option it would be for multi-author WP-sites.
Oh, that makes much more sense. That could keep all writers from publishing unless the post was a certain length long.
very nice post, thanks for tips
I like “Admin Management Extended” plugin. Great list, thanks.
I dig the ‘WordPress Admin Bar’; ve+ry useful, thanks for posting.
Claudio.
Awesome post! Immedietly after reading it I got several of the plugins you mentioned – I really like the Admin Bar – it works better than the WordPress.com one, and is such a time saver. Thanks again, PBD!
Looking for a way to list ALL TAGS in admin area when writing or editing a post/page, not just those in “Choose from the most used tags”.
Thanks!
Great lists of plugins for the admin panel! Now I can make mine organized. Thanks for sharing!
Surely one of the best plugin list for admins…
download few of them.
I must say most of them was not seen before.
Thanks for shared.
Makes you think about things you weren’t thinking about
These will come in handy. Thanks for the share.
This is a fantastic list. There are so many lists of useless plugins out there, and this one stands a head above the rest. Kudos.
This is a great list! The plugins definitely “make life easier” especially for those who are into offshore web development business. Thanks for sharing this!
Nice list of plugin ! I am going to use wordpress tweaks and wordpress admin quick menu.
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I want that the editor can write in a category but not in another category. Is a plugin for that ?
or do you what can i do ?
Thanx
thanx for informing about these plugins, currently using Ozh Admin Drop Down Ozh Admin Drop Down Menu & WordPress Tweaks , in my opinion these are really usefull.
May you can add many more plugins for admin, for comment or Tiny writing. Because I want to make writing article better than before. Thanks…
BED-BOY
Great power tools for your blogs. Saved for use another day…. Thanks!
This plugins are good but as I always keep the number of plugins used minimal, is there any hack to get the same functionality as you get while using Admin Expert Mode and Admin Trim Interface?
Thanks for the list of useful admin plugins :)
That’s a great collection of plugins!
I am running a blog, where several people write posts and then plugins like this admin notepad or other of this collection are simply great!
many thanks!
Very useful!
Thanks for sharing :)
One of the most complete collections Admin plugins for WordPress. Thank you very much!
Thank you for this plugins. The best collection plugins for Admin. Very useful for me.
WordPress is something else. There are a lot of plugins that now I am confused of which one to use. But thanks for sharing.
great plugins, thank you
Great. The Admin Management Extended is of a particular great use for administrators in a hurry.
Thx for amazing tipps. WordPress Tweaks Plugin is my favorit.
Cool plugins. I also really like the Custom Login Plugin. The default login page is boring. :(
Plugin number 4. Simply Tags,
If you upgrade your WP to 2.9, you’ll need to edit your plugin script from:
if ( strpos($wp_version, ‘2.7’) !== false || strpos($wp_version, ‘2.8’) !== false )
to:
if ( strpos($wp_version, ‘2.7’) !== false || strpos($wp_version, ‘2.8’) !== false || strpos($wp_version, ‘2.9’) !== false )
See @ http://jktagus.web.id/2009/12/how-to-make-simple-tags-plugin-working-in-wordpress-2-9/
Very nice plugin. A question: what’s the best auto tag plugin?
very nice post.. thank you…
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat list. Thank you so much. I’m gonna put these to use.
Thank’s for this collection…
Great post! Thank you
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Some nice plugins, I particularly like the look of 8 and 11, although will give a few more of them a go as well :)
Wow!
Wordpress is my favorite blog platform, because it has thousands of plugins, millions of themes, fully customizable, etc… I love it!
And this is a wonderful collection! Thank you!
I just installed the pre-publish plugin. I run a multi-user blog and it used to be hard to get people to remember to enter stuff in the WP->Twitter field and categorize their posts. NOT ANY MORE! Thanks for putting this together. I really like this site.
Great collection, i really like the plugin that lets the navigation drop down menu.
Great article! I’m loving Adminimize. It’s like heaven for control freaks!
Wow, I wasn’t even aware at how customizable the admin area was. I’, gonna have to try out some of these plugins. Most notably, the Pre-post reminder one. I’m a little forgetful sometimes.
Great list of plugins. I know that I could use a few of these for all of my wordpress blogs but I never knew that the admin area was so customisable. Thanks for sharing all of these.
great plugins .. thank you for the post .
I still haven’t got the admin panel looking like I want. I have tried Ozh and Fluency, but neither suit my needs. Might have to go and do it myself. Nice post.
really nice post and i will definitely use some of the plugins in my blog:)
Like the others have said. While it is quite expensive, it is one of the best frameworks!!!!!
Great post! Thank you
Great and very helpful plugins!
Great post.Nice plugins.Thank you.
This was a great list. I’ve been looking for some enhanced admin features. I will definitely be using some of your suggestions! Thanks.
Thanks for such wonderful post..You empowered my Day and WP
very good site. thank you.
Thanks! A truly great collection of useful admin plugins for WP.
great list, the WP admin notepad is defo a winner with me because it saves me jotting it down on the nearest bit of paper then losing it(!) its good to have this space on your dashboard :) i installed and activated the plugin on my blog but it didn’t work due to a common issue (see plugin site), so i used an alternative plugin called ‘Dashboard Notepad’
Its a nice list! I used some of them, although the “big” changes in the admin comes with some dissadvantages :s
Ohz admin drop down menu is epic!
Great list, I need to check out more of these that you mentioned. Simply Tags and Pre Publish reminders would help greatly right now. Consistency and proper labeling always need attention.
Helps you more effectively edit your themes or plugins when you only have access to a browser, by enabling syntax highlighting in WordPress’ integrated source code s editors
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Great list, thanks
Great list. I have been using “WordPress Admin Bar” for my clients with some customization made. It restored lot of space that occupied by the default wordpress admin menu on the left.
Thanks for your sharing. I need it for my website. Great!
Very cool list! Tnx!
thanks nice site.
So cool We love
cool plugins..thanks
The admin area color scheme plugin doesn’t bode well with the “selected” font color, as it looks greyed out and you can barely read it.
Also, I think it looks cheesy. Nice touch.
Some of these are really great, its always about finding those plug ins to make the front end of your website to look great but these also thinking about the user as well as the reader which is great. This is something I will definitely be looking at for my wordpress sites in the future.
Some of these plugs are brilliant and ones that I am going to be using in my wordpress sites from now on. i thought I knew my way around the dashboard panel pretty well but this is something that will make it even simpler now.
I was curious if you ever thought of changing the layout of your site? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1 or two images. Maybe you could space it out better?
Great post.Nice plugins.Thank you.
Excellent List of Plugins. Right to the point and covers most important areas. Just bear in mind to have minimal list of plugins as every plugin activated on your website can slowdown your blog