German WordPress developer Frank Bültge has spent many long hours creating a plugin that encapsulates more than a dozen enhancements often requested by multisite super admins. His Multisite Enhancements plugin has been hosted on github for some time, which made it rather obscure. WordPress plugins hosted on github are often very difficult to find unless you already know about them or know how to search them. That’s why the WP Engineer team decided to add his plugin to the WordPress repository.
Multisite Enhancements includes many handy features that one might otherwise get by installing a dozen different plugins. Most of these additions fall within several major categories. Let’s break them down:
Enhanced Network Menus and Admin Features
- Adds Blog and User ID in network view more
- Enables an ‘Add New’ link under the Plugins menu for Network admins
- Adds several useful items to the multisite ‘Network Admin’ admin bar
The Multisite Enhancements plugin makes blog and user IDs easy to find in the dashboard. This makes life easier for admins working with themes and plugins that require IDs for configuration.
Perhaps one of the most useful features of this plugin is the “Add New” plugins menu added to blogs for super admins. This saves quite a bit of time in network management:
Enhancements to Plugin Pages
- On the network plugins page, show which blogs have this plugin active
- On the network theme page, show which blogs have the theme active
The Multisite Enhancements plugin gives admins more insight into which blogs are using installed plugins and themes. This helps admins to know what extensions can be safely deactivated and/or deleted.
Network Branding
- Adds favicon from theme folder to the admin area to more easily identify the blog. It uses the favicon.ico file in the theme folder of the active theme in each blog
- Removes the ‘W’ logo and its sublinks in the admin bar
- Adds a Favicon to each blog on the admin bar ‘My Sites’ menu
This plugin brings the favicon into the admin area, helping admins visually identify blogs on the network.
Resource Monitoring
- Change Admin footer text for administrators to quickly view current used RAM, SQL, RAM Version
Multisite super admins usually bear the responsibility of keeping network performance at its best. Adding these stats to the footer helps admins monitor resources available to the network.
Extra Functions
Depending on what version of WordPress your network is running, there are some extra functions available through the Multisite Enhancements plugin:
- The function get_blog_list() is currently deprecated in the WP Core but currently usable. The plugin checks this and get an alternative in inc/autoload/core.php
- If you develop with the alternative to this function, then you can use the method get_blog_list() in class Multisite_Core. It also uses caching with the Transient API. Read more about the function in inc/autoload/class-core.php.
- If you use WordPress version 3.7 and higher, check out the wp_get_sites() function. This is the new alternative function inside the core to get all sites inside the network. The function accepts an array with arguments.
The Multsite Enhancements plugin enables you to manage your network more efficiently. It’s compatible with WordPress 3.7 and even works with 3.8-alpha. Download it for free from wordpress.org via your dashboard.
Thanks a lot for the post, for the praise to this small plugin.