The wordpress.org infrastructure work has reminded me how much I dislike having the Super Admin/Network Admin pages appearing alongside the regular per-blog admin pages. I think the Super Admin menu should go away, away to a separate network admin area. Ticket 14435 is where I’m scratching this itch. The patches there move the network admin pages to wp-admin/network/. It is a completely separate admin area just for network management. It is available only from the main site url. Visiting wp-admin/network from other blogs in the network will redirect to the one true place. If you have multiple networks, they each will have a network admin area.
While I was in there I added a network plugins.php. Network activations and deactivations happen here and only here. Network activate/deactivate is no longer available from the blog admins.
Thoughts?
Jane Wells 12:17 am on July 28, 2010 Permalink
Agreed. We can brush up the UI for these screens in 3.1.
Alex M. 12:21 am on July 28, 2010 Permalink
Sounds good to me and will make it less confusing.
John Blackbourn 12:22 am on July 28, 2010 Permalink
This bugs me too, and is especially confusing when you’re on the network admin page but everything else is telling you you’re in the admin area for a member blog. +1
John Blackbourn 12:25 am on July 28, 2010 Permalink
Off-topic: Why is this post tagged with ‘multisite’ and ‘network’ yet only the ‘multisite’ tag is clickable? (Underneath Ryan’s name at the top.)
Ryan Boren 12:29 am on July 28, 2010 Permalink
I think because this is the only post in that tag.
Alex M. 12:30 am on July 28, 2010 Permalink
It’s only clickable if there are other posts with that tag. Note the “(3)” following “multisite” — that’s how many posts there are with that tag.
EDIT: Bah, too slow!
Lloyd Budd 4:18 pm on July 28, 2010 Permalink
I like this.
I’m a little hesitant of “It is available only from the main site url.” Super/Network admin being able to be in the context of the current blog is very handy. It saves a lot of extra text entry and clicks having to look up a blog.
I think there are benefits of making it blatant that one is logged in as a super admin. It’s a good reminder not to be
Ryan Boren 4:50 pm on July 28, 2010 Permalink
There are definitely some work flow advantages to allowing network admin to be in the context of the current blog. Things like being able to “Add user to current blog” from network/users.php would be nice. We need to document some common work flows and see how best to accommodate them.
Ryan Boren 4:58 pm on July 28, 2010 Permalink
Other things to consider. Make the Network Admin link sensitive to context. Link to network/themes.php if on themes page. Link to site editor if on other pages. Or, add an action to Favorite Actions for super admins.
Ron 5:00 pm on July 28, 2010 Permalink
From a workflow perspective, I agree with Lloyd. I was going to suggest using context variables, but I see Ryan beat me to it
Ryan Boren 7:56 pm on July 30, 2010 Permalink
I added some code to save the blog ID for the last blog admin area visited. This allows linking back to that blog from the network admin. Just an experiment. I really like having a canonical network admin and this is an attempt to have it both ways.