[wp-hackers] Page Title for Admin Menu
Chris Williams
chris at clwill.com
Sat Feb 14 01:50:22 GMT 2009
> I may play around with core some more to see exactly what it takes to
> get_admin_page_title to return the page title of the top-level menu
> item.
Right, this is the spot, I started walking through it the other day, and
then I just had to get my plugin out, so I stopped poking through it. I
think I have some time, so I'll resume.
Thanks for your input,
Chris
> From: Chris Jean <gaarai at gaarai.com>
> Reply-To: <wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com>
> Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:27:04 -0600
> To: <wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com>
> Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Page Title for Admin Menu
>
> It's true that Comments is like Dashboard. In fact, it is set up exactly
> the same way. If you look at the code, it doesn't have a page title
> declared for it either. Just like all the other top-level menu items of
> core, that entry is just an empty string.
>
> Just like Dashboard, if you look in the wp-admin/comment.php file,
> you'll find it manually assigning the title to the $title variable.
>
> If you are looking at the wp-admin/menu.php file and see where the array
> has the first entry defined, that's not the page title; its the menu
> title. If you look at the add_menu_page code, you see that the page
> title is put in the fourth array location while the menu title is put in
> the first array location.
>
> I would agree with you on the idea of this being a bug if there is
> inconsistent code and things don't work properly. However, things do
> work properly and each instance of a stand-alone top-level menu item in
> core is coded the same way. This means that this odd situation is either
> a) a bad side-effect of trying to stay as backwards-compatible as
> possible or b) some very sloppy coding that was patched up quickly and
> never cleaned up.
>
> Since I don't have access to all the code revisions between 1.2.2 and
> 1.5, I can only make assumptions. However, the fact that the parameter
> exists, the manual entries into the $menu array all have a blank string
> in that array position, and the existence of the $title variable all
> suggest that this is due to supporting legacy code.
>
> I may play around with core some more to see exactly what it takes to
> get_admin_page_title to return the page title of the top-level menu
> item. Maybe I can find a solution that is cleaner than the one that I've
> already provided. Who knows, I may even find a way to clean up core so
> that the page title of the top-level item is used in the event that it
> doesn't have any sub-menu items and $title isn't set. Of course, I'll
> have to do this without breaking anything.
>
> Happy 0123456789 Day everyone.
>
> Chris Jean
> http://gaarai.com/
> http://wp-roadmap.com/
> http://dnsyogi.com/
>
>
>
> Chris Williams wrote:
>> 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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>>>>>>
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