Cleaner Start Page for “Add Plugins” (Installer)
A LARGE search box to find plugins for installing more easily and way faster.
No clutter. The regular content of the “Featured” tab was removed: not the 6 same old plugin cards cards any longer and no useless tag cloud anymore!
Plus: set the number of displayed plugin cards per page via “Screen Options” tab (on top right corner).
Scratching My Own Itch
As of WordPress 4.0+, going to “Add Plugins” page and being welcomed by always the same old 6 featured plugin cards annoyed me big time! So I thought on how to change this default behavior. Due to WordPress’ genius Hooks & Filter functionality I could easily tweak this via my plugin.
Now it starts with what should have been the default (in my opinion) from the beginning: a large and nice plugin search box – because that’s what I do all the day :). Side benefit: better performance as no external plugin card content has to be loaded!
And there you have it, a one-purpose admin helper plugin aiming at (super) administrators and webmasters searching for and installing plugins from WordPress.org repository on a daily basis.
Video of Plugin Walkthrough plus Demo:
original video link: Screencast by plugin developer David Decker
Benefits & Advantages
- Cleaner, more easy, more useful!
- Improved performance of
plugin-install.phpadmin start page! - Additional curated topics with list of plugin tags (from WordPress.org) for lots of use cases etc.
- Additional basic integration of “WPCore Plugin Manager” base plugin and service, as well as “WP Favs”.
- Added “Screen Options” tab (on top right corner) to set number of plugin cards per page on a per user basis.
- Tweaked “ZIP Uploader page” – larger file upload field, plus bigger button.
- Search field and plugins number integration for “At a Glance” and “Right Now” (Multisite) Dashboard widgets.
- Optional “Slim Mode” to hide various help texts etc. from the plugin – for power users (see bottom of FAQ page).
- Highly extensible: Additional hooks and filters in place so you could easily tweak my plugin’s output (or add, or remove) if ever needed
Download & install the zip archive
The plugin package installer can be downloaded from the WP2E project tab called “code”.
1 – Select the version to download if this option is available otherwise the “latest” version of the main plugin will be used.
2 – After downloading the zip archive install the plugin package installer in you local environment and activate the script from the plugin list.
3 – Under the section “Plugins” of the admin dashboard you should see a new “Dependencies & Licenses” link. Follow the instructions from this panel to finalize the installation of the missing dependencies.
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- Give a name to your project
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- Download the Installer Package
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- Install & activate the plugin locally
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- Install the suggested dependencies
Tips: Use the WP2E panel to add/suggest new dependencies to the local installation. Press F5 in the list of dependencies if the changes are not displayed right away.