The Admin Menu Tree Page View plugin, which adds a tree-view layout of content in the WordPress admin, has been refactored to support more content types. The plugin is an admin utility similar to Hierarchy or the commercial OrganizeWP plugin that reworks the CMS to show content in one place, but it offers a simpler set of features for free with no ads or upsells. These types of plugins are valuable tools on larger, CMS-heavy WordPress sites.
Previously, the Admin Menu Tree Page View plugin focused on pages, allowing users to better visualize the page hierarchy/tree structure, add pages directly after or inside another post, and easily reorder pages via drag and drop.
Version 2.8 adds support for all public post types – posts, pages, and custom post types, which was a long requested feature. The plugin’s author, WordPress developer Ciprian Popescu, said adding more post types made the dashboard menu unmanageable and the backend slow, requiring him to update the plugin to us a top-level menu page.
“The solution here was to move the pages to a top level menu page,” Popescu said. “This increased the ‘one click away’ feature to ‘two clicks away,’ which is not a bad trade-off in my opinion, especially when all public post types are now available in a hierarchical tree layout. Having a separate page now removed the need for collapsing the child <ul> elements, as the purpose of this plugin is to quickly see all your pages in a bird’s eye view manner.”
Version 2.8 also removes some redundant features, cookies, and JavaScript resources, as the expand/collapse functionality is no longer necessary. Next on the roadmap for future releases Popescu is working on adding caching for post types, removing the jQuery and jQueryUI dependency, and improving dragging and dropping to work inside child elements.
Interesting. Good to see progress on something that improves the native WP page management. Personally I’ve been a long time user of the Nested Pages plugin. I prefer it to the above as it works right in your “Pages” menu, so it feels pretty natural.
Either way, both these plugins to me raise the question of when the WP Core team will focus on finally updating the WP admin? In my opinion it’s long overdue. Whenever I’ve worked in other CMS admins (ex: GravCMS) it’s a breath of fresh air because it feels a generational leap forward in visual appearance.