[wp-hackers] Page Title for Admin Menu
Chris Williams
chris at clwill.com
Fri Feb 13 23:03:12 GMT 2009
Thank you for this comprehensive detective job, an excellent write-up, and a
way around it.
However, I'm even more convinced that this is a bug, not a feature. There
is another top menu item in core that has no submenus, and also has a proper
page title, and that's Comments. From what I can tell, it gets away with it
because it manually loads the menu[] array, as other core items do.
More to the point, however, I think it should be possible to create a
plug-in that has only a top-menu item, and still benefits from a page title.
Your ingenious solution below will be a temporary fix, but I think a real
one is also in order.
Thanks again for your detective work, perhaps you missed your calling -- the
CIA could use help finding Bin Laden :)
Chris
> From: Chris Jean <gaarai at gaarai.com>
> Reply-To: <wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com>
> Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:36:43 -0600
> To: <wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com>
> Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Page Title for Admin Menu
>
> I don't believe that it's a bug; rather, I think that this is just a
> complex issue. Let me explain.
>
> I dug through 1.5 - 2.7.1 and found that all of those versions have the
> page title parameter for top-level menu items. I also found that none of
> those versions actually define the page title for any of the menus built
> into core (they just use a blank string: '').
>
> However, I have found that all of the versions actually do refer to the
> page title in the $menu data structure. You can find references to page
> title by searching for "$menu_array[3]" in the
> wp-admin/includes/plugin.php file (wp-admin/admin-functions.php file in
> versions before 2.3).
>
> I traced the logic and found that its possible use comes down to the
> code found in the get_admin_page_title and get_admin_page_parent
> functions. Basically, if a parent can't be found (returned from
> get_admin_page_parent), there is the possibility that
> get_admin_page_title will use the top-level menu item's page title.
> However, when I looked through get_admin_page_parent, I can't think of
> any possible scenario where a parent wouldn't be found.
>
> Looking farther back to version 1.2.2 (the only publicly available
> version I could find pre-1.5), I see that there is a single-level menu
> that doesn't support page titles. This combined with the fact that 1.5
> has two-level menus and more-or-less unused top-level menu page titles,
> I believe that I know why they are there.
>
> I believe somewhere in 1.3 or 1.4 development, page titles were added to
> the menus. Then sometime before 1.5, second level menus were added which
> had their own page titles. These new page titles superseded the old page
> titles, but the top-level-menu page titles remained for backwards
> compatibility.
>
> Here's where the story gets weird.
>
> From all the code I've looked through, the presence of a page title
> parameter for a top-level menu is nothing more than vestigial. Even in
> the earliest publicly available builds of WP where the parameter exists,
> the core doesn't make any use of the parameter and simply shuffles past
> its existence by filling in the field with empty strings.
>
> Based on this, I would assume that there aren't any top-level menus that
> are devoid of sub-menu items and that the top-level menu items serve as
> nothing more than simple containers for the sub-menu items. And I would
> be wrong.
>
> Just look at a new install of WordPress, and you will see a standalone
> top-level menu: Dashboard. In a standard install, Dashboard doesn't have
> any sub-menu items. When I realized this, I looked at the code and found
> that there weren't any entries in $submenu to create the Dashboard
> sub-menu entry that appears if plugins, such as Akismet, adds a sub-menu
> to the Dashboard top-level menu.
>
> This confused me at first, but I looked at the add_submenu_page code and
> found that it generates the first $submenu entry automatically when a
> sub-menu page is added to a menu entry that doesn't have any sub-menu pages.
>
> Even though the Dashboard menu entry doesn't have any sub-menu entries
> by default, it still does not make use of the page title parameter.
> Instead, it does something hackish (IMHO), it has to manually set the
> $title variable before get_admin_page_title is called. The
> get_admin_page_title will immediately return the value of the $title
> variable if it is not empty.
>
> After seeing this, I cooked up the following quick plugin:
>
> <?php
>
> /*
> Plugin Name: Menu Test
> */
>
> add_action( 'admin_menu', menu_test_add_pages );
>
> function menu_test_add_pages() {
> $page_ref = add_menu_page( '', 'Menu Test', 10, 'menu-test',
> 'menu_test_index' );
>
> add_action( 'load-' . $page_ref, 'menu_test_set_title' );
> }
>
> function menu_test_index() {
> echo "<h3>Menu Test</h3>";
> }
>
> function menu_test_set_title() {
> global $title;
> $title = 'Menu Test';
> }
>
> ?>
>
> All this plugin does is register a menu entry that doesn't have any
> sub-menu entries and give the resulting page a title. This is more or
> less the same way that Dashboard has set the title since 1.5.
>
> Sorry for the long reply. It was fun digging into this. I hope that my
> reply helps you out.
>
> Chris Jean
> http://gaarai.com/
> http://wp-roadmap.com/
> http://dnsyogi.com/
>
>
>
> Chris Williams wrote:
>> Exactly, so is that a bug? Is it impossible/illegal to have a plug-in with
>> only a top level menu?
>>
>>
>>
>>> From: Gaarai <gaarai at gaarai.com>
>>> Reply-To: <wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com>
>>> Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:21:02 -0600
>>> To: <wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com>
>>> Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Page Title for Admin Menu
>>>
>>> In my experience, it isn't the top-level menu that sets the title;
>>> rather, the first sub-menu under it does.
>>>
>>> Chris Jean
>>> http://gaarai.com/
>>> http://wp-roadmap.com/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Chris Williams wrote:
>>>
>>>> Despite my overabundant use of the word "really" (which I "really" regret
>>>> now :) ), does anybody have any input on this issue?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> From: Chris Williams <chris at clwill.com>
>>>>> Reply-To: <wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com>
>>>>> Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:27:16 -0800
>>>>> To: <wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com>
>>>>> Subject: [wp-hackers] Page Title for Admin Menu
>>>>>
>>>>> I am writing a plugin that adds an admin menu page (not submenu). It does
>>>>> this because it¹s really quite a separate thing < a calendar of racing
>>>>> events, nothing to do with the WP functions, it¹s really a separate data
>>>>> table and everything. So, it doesn¹t really belong down in ³settings², or
>>>>> ³tools².
>>>>>
>>>>> This is all good, I have it working with add_menu_page and all is fine.
>>>>> It
>>>>> really only needs one page (like the ³Links² or ³Comments² menu items),
>>>>> it¹s
>>>>> just an ³edit events² page. There is one small problem, and that¹s that
>>>>> the
>>>>> HTML page title is null. It says simply ³[blogname] > -- Wordpress².
>>>>> Nothing I put in the $page_title parameter on add_menu_page works.
>>>>>
>>>>> If I have a submenu page, it works, but not with just a plain
>>>>> add_menu_page.
>>>>> I believe the issue is in get_admin_page_title in
>>>>> wp-admin/includes/plugin.php, but I haven¹t debugged it completely.
>>>>>
>>>>> My questions are: 1) am I doing something incorrectly that is causing
>>>>> this,
>>>>> 2) is this a known issue and I should just chill, or 3) should I figure it
>>>>> out and propose a patch?
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>> Chris
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> wp-hackers mailing list
>>>>> wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
>>>>> http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/wp-hackers
>>>>>
>>>>>
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