Yesterday\u00a0I ranted about\u00a0Why You Should Never Use Colored Icons Inside the WP Admin Panel\u00a0which stirred up quite a debate in the WordPress community. About 90% of the folks that I\u00a0had a conversation with agreed with me, but there were strong arguments against it by some folks. In hindsight, I should have created a poll after the post to attract better & clearer feedback.<\/p>\n
This is one other debate\u00a0which we need to talk about. When building a plugin or a theme, a WordPress developer more often than not needs to provide its users with a way\u00a0to configure the product at hand. Since this configuration is meant mostly for the administrators, you get to see either a new menu or a sub-menu created for it.<\/p>\n
If you are like me\u00a0<\/span>\u2014 big fan of consistency and following coding standards is important to you then, chances are you are into what I call responsible WordPress development. As a responsible WP developer, you try and always think about the users first. How will your users interact with your product?<\/p>\n Do you want to\u00a0be intrusive when it comes to their\u00a0sites’ admin panels or do you want to weigh more on better user experience? It gets more interesting when you start talking about creating a new menu vs a sub-menu for your product. And that’s\u00a0where we need to have a discussion today.<\/p>\n So, you have built an excellent product. Now you most definitely see it as an important\u00a0thing for your users, and more so you would want to create a separate menu for it. Believe me, when I created my first few plugins, it made little to no sense to me \u2014 at that time \u2014 to why not to create a separate menu.<\/p>\n I wanted my plugins to be important; I wanted them to emerge as a brand and what not. But as I grew more fond of development, I realized how important of a responsibility it is for a developer to consider what’s best for the users of his plugin.<\/p>\n Anywho,\u00a0this is strictly my opinion about this thing. I think a WordPress product should create a new menu only when:<\/p>\n Do NOT create a separate menu just to put a custom icon to help yourself brand the concept. That’s not\u00a0justifiable enough.<\/p>\n This is a hard one. I agree.\u00a0Most of the times what we build is quite important \u2014 it doesn’t hurt to think that way does it? \u2014 But at the same time, the\u00a0utility\u00a0of your WordPress product has a lot to do with where you put it. By no means, putting your\u00a0product’s settings page inside the Settings or Tools menu\u00a0says that it will be ignored\u00a0or something like it’s less important.<\/p>\n Here’s my take on why\u00a0and when you should think about creating a sub-menu for your WP product<\/p>\nThe Case for Creating a New Menu#<\/a><\/h3>\n
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The Case for Settling With Sub-Menus#<\/a><\/h3>\n