Today I’ll show you a little trick that will surely be useful if you are a WordPress plugin developer.
When you develop a plugin for WordPress, it is common to create a new menu for the plugin and its internal pages –including a settings page– in the WordPress Dashboard.
However, many times we download plugins from the official WordPress plugin directory and we find that once we install and activate a plugin, we don’t know what else we have to do with it in order to make it work.
In the list of plugins that we have in the WordPress Dashboard we can see the plugins that we have installed and active. In addition, below the title of each plugin there are additional actions to activate, deactivate or eliminate the plugin itself.
Let’s see how to add more actions to our plugins to make it easier for users who download and activate a plugin to, for example, visit its settings page. To this purpose we are going to add an additional link to the plugin settings page.
What we’re going to need is to use the plugin_action_links_{$plugin_file} filter in WordPress. You can find its documentation here.
Basically, this filter has as parameter a list with the links that are just below the name of the plugin. We just have to create an additional link and add it to this list in the filter, so that WordPress ends up showing it in the user interface.
The code below adds a link to the settings page in our plugin Nelio Content plugin:
As you can see, the name of the filter is plugin_action_links_{$plugin_file} but we in the code have used plugin_action_links_nelio-content/nelio-content.php. This is because the {$plugin_file} part refers to the path of the main plugin file within the WordPress plugins directory.
Our plugin Nelio Content has nelio-content.php as the main file, which is located inside the nelio-content folder. Hence, we have used the string plugin_action_links_nelio-content/nelio-content.php in the filter name.
Remember to adapt this to your specific case. You can also use WordPress functions like plugin_basename to build this name, which you will find explained here.
Apart from that, the code is quite simple. We create a link ($settings_link) and add it to the list ($links) just before returning it.
The settings page of our plugin is at the URL /wp-admin/admin.php?page=nelio-content-settings. In line 6 of the code we assemble this URL using the function get_admin_url() (more info here) to which we concatenated admin.php at the end. With this we get /wp-admin/admin.php. To add the page parameter that ends up mounting the URL correctly we use the function add_query_arg that you can find here.
With the previous code we get the link to the settings page of the plugin as you can see in the following image:
With what we’ve explained here you have the possibility to add the links you want in the list of plugins on the WordPress dashboard. However, use this wisely. Do not fill the list of actions with links unless they provide some value to the user. Otherwise you will be worsening your user experience.
Featured image by Rima Kruciene on Unsplash.
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