Recently I have been working extensively on projects that involve working with customising the WordPress admin area to enable a better user experience. Perhaps the most notable example is working on the Edupress project with Rachel McCollin. During the course of working with amending the WordPress admin it has become apparent to me that there are a distinct lack of consistency in the admin hooks. Let me explain.
With the advent of theme frameworks a good few years ago now, developers have become very familiar with hooks, as well of course as those that exist in core that enable us to build on top of WordPress in the form of plugins. However a lot of the work developers do tends to be with the front end of WordPress in the form of themes. It was not until I started working extensively to convert the backend of WordPress that it became apparent there was a distinct lack of hooks and filters to work with, in terms of adding and removing content from the screen.
You can see from the screenshot above just what can be done in terms of customising the WordPress admin.
After working on the admin screens for Edupress I went ahead and created the Show Admin Display Hooks plugin, going through all the admin files in the wp-admin folder and looking for the available hooks. I was only concerned with the display hooks i.e. the ones that allow you to output content to the screen rather than the ones that enable you to add scripts and styles or functions etc.
The plugin outputs all the names of the hooks to the admin screens in the place where they are run, therefore you can see which hooks are available to work with.
It became apparent that there is a lack of consistency for developers in the hooks that they work with. Lets take a look at an example of what I mean. Below you can see two screenshots:
As you can see there are more hooks to play in the post editor screen. The problem here for me, is that all the admin screens have a page title in a h2 tag. Adding content below the title on the post edit screen can be done with the edit_form_top hook but there is no hook to do the same thing below the title on the post listing screen. Therefore a bit of consistency I believe would be helpful in this case. Therefore I would propose that a after_page_title hook is introduced on all admin screen after the page title is outputted. It seems that a before_page_title is not needed as the admin_notices and all_admin_notices hooks appear on every page.
Another hook that I would like to see added is a hook that fires directly after the “Add New” button on the post listing and post edit screen. This is a great place to add additional action buttons and would benefit from a hook. This could be something like add_new_h2 which is the name of the class given to the buttons in that area.
There is a need in the WordPress admin for plugin authors to be able to display a custom post type and associated taxonomies for that post type whilst only adding one menu item. If they add their post type under a sub menu that already exists such as Appearance, then taxonomies have to go in separately as you cannot have a third level menu. With an add_new_h2 hook, plugin authors could have links to the post types taxonomies in that place instead of an extra menu link. This problem is outlined by Justin Tadlock with his Whistles plugin here, although Justin is suggesting a tabbed approach to solve the problem.
It is clear then that the WordPress admin does provide a number of action hooks for developer to output their own content in various places, however I think with a little more consistency on the hooks available as well as the addition of one or two additional hooks it would be much easier for developers.
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