Version 2.10 – Tweaks

This release adds a new tab called “Tweaks” to the plugin settings page.

Tweaks tab

This tab contains miscellaneous small modifications (“tweaks”) that you can enable for specific roles or users. These tweaks are available in version 2.10:

  • Hide “Screen Options” and “Help”.
  • Hide all admin notices. This includes even core notices like “settings saved”.
  • Hide specific user profile fields.
  • Hide sidebars and sidebar widgets. This applies to Appearance -> Widgets but not to the site front-end.
  • Hide TinyMCE buttons (TinyMCE is the classic post editor).

The plugin updates the list of available TinyMCE buttons when you open the post editor, so if you notice that the list is missing a button, try editing a post or page.

Why Add Tweaks?

Over the years, users have sent me many feature suggestions. Some of the suggestions are both valuable and relatively easy to implement, but they don’t quite fit anywhere. Adding more and more options to the menu editor wouldn’t work: every top level menu item already has 10+ settings and expanding that list without limit would make it difficult to find the settings that you actually need. Trying to sort the settings into separate tabs is also impractical because many of the feature suggestions have little in common. You would end up with a lot of new tabs that each contain just a handful of checkboxes. The plugin already has 8 tabs (more if you install the Branding add-on), so this approach also runs the risk of making the settings too cluttered.

The “Tweaks” tab is a compromise: one new tab for all the little customizations that don’t fit anywhere else, organized in sections. That’s still a lot of disparate settings in one place, but it’s somewhat orderly and you can collapse the sections that you’re not interested in. The plugin will remember which sections were open and which were closed.

If you don’t need any of the available tweaks, you can slightly improve plugin performance by turning off the “Tweaks” module in the “Settings” tab.

Other Changes

Version 2.10 also includes a few minor bug fixes related to meta boxes, plugin compatibility, and error handling.

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