WordPress is awesome at almost everything, but there’s always been one thing that I’ve never liked, and that’s the vertical menu section on the left hand side of the screen.
It looks nice, I’ll give you that, but it’s not very user friendly.
I use WordPress daily, almost all day, and I’m surprised the scroll wheel of my mouse hasn’t yet worn out due to the scrolling I have to do to navigate my around. And all that clicking to open and close the menus. It all seems such an effort and a waste of time.
Today I’ve come across a plugin, Ozh Admin Drop Down Menu, that converts the menu to a drop-down version and moves it to a horizontal position at the top of the screen. It’s just so much easier to use. Surely it can’t be long before this type of menu is included in the WordPress core, either as the default setting or as an option. And judging by the amount of downloads there has been (2,294 last week and 401,196 all time) plenty of other people may well be of the same opinion.
There are a few settings for you to play with. These mostly change the look of the menu. You can choose from the standard view, as seen in the screenshot below:
*I took this screengrab on a 1024 x 768 (dual) monitor. As you can see the screen isn’t quite wide enough to accommodate the entire menu section because of the additional plugins I use. On my widescreen laptop it looks just fine.
The alternative option is the compact size, which I prefer:
And if you want to change the background color of the menu you can:
Choose from the following colours or add a hexadecimal value of your choice:
And if everything goes wrong just hit the reset button and return the settings to their default states.
All in all a really cool plugin from planetozh.com
Looks like a great plugin, I installed it briefly and it gave me some problems but I am sure it’s nothing that can’t be solved, I’ll look into it later on, thanks for sharing this.
What problems did you have with it? Everything seems okay for me so far…
Great Idea! I am also having the same frustration with the left bar setup. I’m going to install this now. Thanks!