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Please Note:
My WordPress plugins have a new home.
If you would like to take a look at my plugins that are currently available please visit my plugin site and follow your nose – Stuff at Yellow Swordfish.
In the immediately previous item I said that I was fast becoming a fan of the Opera browser. As a WordPress user, I am also a fan of the Admin Drop Down Menu Plugin from Ozh. As any WordPress user knows, the admin menus are always a two click – two screen load for anything other than the first option in the menu list. In other words – a real pain! The plugin from Ozh deals with this by floating the submenu options below the main menu options which, as far as I am concerned, was wonderful but for two problems. Using a laptop with a touchpad often means losing the submenu list as you need to be accurate. Try it and you’ll know what I mean. And the second probem? It doesn’t work in Opera!
So I set myself the task of correcting both of these problems by ensuring good behaviour in Opera and by making the submenu list a true drop down which opens up when you hover over the main menu item. As you can see in the illustrations. 
And then, just for the fun of it, I thought I’d change some of the WordPress Admin colours and look. The Admin panels are really quite a jumble of different styles and short of editing the source code there isn’t anything to be done about that so these are just simple CSS tweaks.
But – and there is always a but: It doesn’t yet work in Internet Exporer! And of course, the original work from Ozh does! But – if you are not using IE, and you fancy proper, drop down menus, then I have bundled it up into a small plugin that you can try. And here’s the good bit – if you like the drop down menus but don’t like the rest of the theme, then a simple edit to the supplied CSS file will give you just that – drop down menus in the standard WordPress admin look. As the illustration above shows.
Bearing in mind I only put this together yesterday this has to be considered an early draft although it is working well for me in Firefox, Opera and Safari. Remember, not yet for Internet Explorer and never for IE5.5 on the Apple Mac! If you are interested in taking a look go to the plugin page. And thanks Ozh for doing the hard bit for me!
interesting plugin no doubt, but i’m looking for something a bit different. something that uses the same existing style and stuff, except, different, when you hover over it the thing on the bottom shows up. no idea how to do it though, so it’s out of my mind for now.
‘thing on the bottom shows up’?
er… what ‘thing on the bottom’ would that be?
testing on ie7 now.
nope, dosn’t seem to work on ie7, well, atleast not the way it works on firefox2.0 and opera9.
on a sidenote, ie7 is quite confusing.
Well – it’s good of you stabani to give me a heads up. I’m not, I suppose, that surprised about IE7 although I need to try it with the IE conditional CSS statements removed I guess – just in case. I’ll try and borrow my sons Windows laptop…..
Still not sure what the ‘thing on the bottom is’ by the way…?
im talking about the default styling in wordpress, the thing on the bottom is the light blue bar.
whenever you hover on the top links, such as write, rather than opening a drop down, it would open up the corresponding light blue bar at the bottom
stabani – that’s exactly what the original plugin from Ozh does – see the link at the top of the item above. I preferred a drop down menu for the reasons stated but Ozh’s routine changes the light blue bar. Mine doesn;t work inInternet Explorer (yet) but the one from Ozh doesn’t work correctly in Opera….
well then, I have good news for you. one of your problems is solved with opera9 is released