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Ever since I started working with WordPress™, I have always disliked the sidebar admin panel on the dashboard. For some reason, I have a mental block with finding things there..it just seems to take me forever and time is money.  Now maybe it’s just my brain not functioning right, you never know. Or at least, that’s what I’ve been told.  But never mind that, I just ignore the comments.

The Best Admin Panel Plug-in Ever for WordPress!

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However, last year I went on a quest to find something that would make things easier for me. I tried a few things, but they didn’t seem to be any better.  But, I finally stumbled across the Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu plug-in.  I don’t know how I missed it. I can’t tell you how much I love this plug-in.  Now with every installation of WordPress™  the very first plug-in I install is this one. Talk about making my life easier!   Simply put, it puts all the WordPress™ admin links in a nice neat horizontal row at the type which I find easier to user.

But it does so much more than that. It gives me so much more real estate on the main page. Moving the admin bar from the side to the top makes so much sense to me.  There are some cool customizations that use can use also.

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One of my favorite features is the actual drop down menu.  I don’t have to click on Pages and then click on Add new or Edit.  I can just click on whatever I need in the drop down and easy find what I need.

Lots of Options to Make

You can pick your colors, whether you want icons or not or even whether you want a full header. I really like the fact that many of the options are just that, options. I prefer to have my header small so that I have lots of real estate for my work on the site. Yet I still want it easy enough to find the feature that I need access to as quickly as possible. As you can see from the last graphic I made the header small.  Hey, if you’re good at recognizing icons, you could even take it down smaller by using just them and removing text.

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On the default WordPress™ there are “bubbles” that indicate whether Plug-ins need to be upgraded or Comments that dealt with in some manner. I like that fact that on the Ozh’ Drop Down Menu I can choose to have only those that need attention show up in the bubble.  I have a client who feels safer by knowing there is nothing to be done and likes to see the zero in the bubble.

Regardless of what you want in in the admin area , it’s likely that this plug-in will be the right choice.

If you’re interested in using the plug-in you can download it from here or visit the authors site here.  Thanks so much for such a great plug-in.  Take peek throughout his entire site.  if you are a big Quake fan, then chances are you know him. (Never could get into it)

So, let me know if you use this plug-in and what you think.  What other plug-ins are your favorites.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 9:10 am and is filed under Plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.