From my experience of making WordPress sites for clients, and for clients in South Africa in particular, there are a lot of people out there who get over-whelmed if updating their site isn’t quick and easy and involves too many menus and processes. As developers I think we can get too caught up in how clever we are being, without considering the needs of the end user. My talk aims to put across some solutions I’ve come across for making the whole process of updating a site as painless and simple as possible

1. IMPROVING EASE OF USE WITH
WORDPRESS ADMIN DASHBOARD

2. OVERVIEW
1. User Roles.
2. The Login Screen.
3. The Dashboard.
4. The Content Editor.
5. Other

3. USER ROLES
- Create a “clean” admin account
- Set-up the main user as an editor
- Use the current_user_can() function:
if ( !current_user_can( 'administrator' ) ) {
//do something awesome here
}

4. THE LOGIN
Hook: login_head

5. THE DASHBOARD
Tidy up...
-Does the client need this item?
-Will the client use this item?
-Is this item an enhancement?

6. THE DASHBOARD
Hook: wp_dashboard_setup
// Globalise the Meta Box Widgets Array
global $wp_meta_boxes;
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_right_now']);

7. THE DASHBOARD

8. THE DASHBOARD

9. THE DASHBOARD
Hook: admin_menu
// Globalise the Menu Array
global $menu;
...
unset( $menu[key($menu)] );
...

10. THE DASHBOARD
// Add Theme Editing Capabilities
$role_object = get_role( 'editor' );
$role_object-add_cap( 'edit_theme_options' );

11. THE DASHBOARD
Hook: admin_head
// Globalise the Submenu Array
global $submenu;
...
unset( $submenu['themes.php'][7] );
...

12. THE CONTENT EDITOR

13. THE CONTENT EDITOR
Hook: admin_head
...
style
#edit-slug-box strong,
#sample-permalink,
#edit-slug-buttons
{display:none;}
/style
...

14. THE CONTENT EDITOR

15. THE CONTENT EDITOR

16. THE CONTENT EDITOR
Hook: tiny_mce_before_init
// Force paste as plain text
...
$init['oninit'] = 'setPlainText';

17. THE CONTENT EDITOR

18. THE CONTENT EDITOR

19. THE CONTENT EDITOR
Hook: admin_init
// Add custom meta box
add_meta_box( $id, $title, $callback, ... );

20. THE CONTENT EDITOR

21. THE CONTENT EDITOR

22. THE CONTENT EDITOR
// render any shortcode and convert new lines to break
nl2br( $string ) # retains line breaks
do_shortcode( $content ) # applies any shortcode(s) in
$content
...
$meta = nl2br( get_post_meta( $postid, $field, $single =
true ) );
return do_shortcode($meta);
...

23. THE CONTENT EDITOR

24. THE CONTENT EDITOR
Filter: widget_text
// render any shortcode in widgets.
add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

25. OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

26. OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
Allow for Errors
a href=facebook.comFacebook/a !-- Will return an error --
// http://www.facebook.com, www.facebook.com, facebook.com will
all work.
if( strpos( $url, 'http://' ) === false )
return 'http://' . $url;
else
return $url
...
Consider creating a plugin

27. CONCLUSION
If it is difficult to update, it won’t get updated.

28. ~fin...