Maestro: The Inline Admin Menu Editor

Toggle “Edit Menu” from the admin bar and the admin menu becomes editable in
place:

• Rename any top-level or submenu item (click the label).
• Reorder items by dragging (top-level and within each submenu).
• Swap icons on top-level items (submenus carry no icon). The picker offers
  dashicons and bundled Bootstrap Icons, with search; any of WordPress’s four
  native icon forms is accepted (dashicon, “none”, base64 image data-URI, or an
  image URL).
• Hide items from chosen roles. Custom roles registered by other plugins
  (User Role Editor,
  Members, etc.) appear automatically.
• Reset a single item to its default, or reset everything at once.

Changes are global — one configuration applies to everyone — and are stored
as a sparse delta layered over the menu WordPress builds each load.

Important: visibility is cosmetic, not access control

Hiding a menu item only declutters the menu. The underlying admin page still
loads for anyone who knows or types its URL, because a page’s own registered
capability is the true lock. This plugin operates on the menu (presentation),
which is a different plane from authorization.

If you need to actually prevent access, pair this with a capability manager:

• User Role Editor —
  simplest way to edit what a role can do.
• PublishPress Capabilities —
  menu-aware; its Pro tier can block admin pages by URL.

The maestro_capability filter lets such a plugin hand editing rights to a custom
capability instead of the default manage_options.

Localization

Maestro uses the maestro-menu-editor text domain. PHP strings use
WordPress translation helpers, and editor labels are passed to JavaScript in a
localized payload so the UI can be translated. The plugin ships a translation
template plus starter language packs for Spanish (es_ES), German (de_DE),
Japanese (ja), French (fr_FR), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt_BR), and Italian
(it_IT). WordPress.org language packs can still override and extend the
bundled catalogs; native-speaker and WordPress Polyglots review is welcome.

How to use

Enter edit mode

After activation, choose Edit Menu from the admin bar. The admin menu stays
expanded while editing so items are visible and stable. Choose Exit Menu
Editing when done; any pending autosave is completed before the page reloads.

Select an item

Click a top-level or submenu item to select it. Keyboard users can focus a menu
item and press Enter or Space. The shared controls panel opens for the selected
item.

Rename

Edit the selected item’s label in the controls panel. Press Enter to commit the
label or Escape to restore the previous label. Changes autosave after a short
pause.

Reorder

Drag menu rows to reorder them. Top-level items reorder among top-level items;
submenu items reorder within their current parent. Moving items between
top-level and submenu positions is deferred to a later version.

Icons

Select a top-level item and open the icon picker. Choose a Dashicon, bundled
Bootstrap Icon, “No icon”, or a valid WordPress icon value. Submenu items do not
have separate WordPress admin menu icons, so the icon control appears only for
top-level items.

Role visibility

Open the visibility control and check the roles that should not see the selected
item in the admin menu. These settings are global for each role and are cosmetic
only; they do not block the underlying page URL.

Reset

Use Reset this item to remove one item’s customizations, or Reset all to
delete the saved configuration and return to the menu generated by WordPress and
active plugins.

Architecture (for developers)

• Config — reads/writes/sanitizes a single option (maestro_config) holding only
  the deltas. Reset = delete the option; the natural menu returns automatically.
• Replay — on a late admin_menu pass, applies rename/icon/visibility to the
  $menu/$submenu globals and reorders submenus. Top-level order uses the
  core custom_menu_order + menu_order filters. Resilient to missing slugs
  (orphans are skipped) and new items (appended at the end).
• Rest — maestro/v1/config (GET/POST/DELETE), capability-gated, X-WP-Nonce.
• The editor JS is driven by a localized model (with DOM ids), not DOM scraping,
  and diffs against captured pristine defaults so the stored config stays sparse.
• Localized editor labels are passed from PHP to JavaScript in maestroData.i18n;
  the runtime zip includes the bundled POT template and starter catalogs.
• WordPress.org listing graphics live in the repository’s .wordpress-org/
  directory: icon.svg, icon-128x128.png, icon-256x256.png,
  banner-772×250.png, banner-1544x500.png, and screenshot-1.png through
  screenshot-4.png.

Known limits / deferred to v2

• Reparenting (moving an item between top-level and submenu) is not included.
  It requires hand-splicing the globals plus parent_file/submenu_file
  highlighting fixes — a known minefield, parked deliberately.
• Separators are preserved in place but not yet add/move/delete-able; their
  generated slugs (separator1…) have no stable identity to key against.
• Renaming an item drops any core-appended count badge (e.g. pending
  comments) from that label, since the badge lives inside the title string.
• Keyboard reordering is not included in v1. Keyboard users can select
  items, rename them, change icons, change visibility, and reset items, but
  drag reordering is mouse/touch-only until v2 move controls are added.
• Submenu sort relies on items registering by the late admin_menu pass; a
  plugin that registers submenus on an unusually late hook may not be captured.

Credits

Bundled Bootstrap Icons are © The Bootstrap
Authors, licensed under the MIT License. They are recoloured to the WordPress
menu grey and embedded as data-URIs; see bin/generate-bootstrap-icons.mjs.