Maestro

In-place editing of the WordPress admin menu — rename items, reorder them, swap top-level icons, and hide items per role. Global configuration, no separate settings screen: the editor is toggled from the admin bar and operates on the menu itself.

▶ Try it live in WordPress Playground — boots a throwaway site with the plugin active, User Switching, and test users (editor / author / contributor / subscriber, password password) so you can try per-role visibility by switching users.

Screenshots

Click any screenshot to open the full-size image.

Edit mode	Icon picker
Posts selected, with the shared controls panel open.	Searchable icon picker with Dashicons and Bootstrap Icons tabs.

Role visibility	Autosave
Per-role visibility picker for hiding a menu item from selected roles.	Renamed menu item saved through debounced autosave.

Important: visibility is cosmetic, not access control

Hiding a menu item only declutters the menu — the underlying page still loads for anyone who knows its URL, because a page's own registered capability is the real lock. For actual access control, pair this with a capability manager (User Role Editor, or PublishPress Capabilities). The maestro_capability filter lets such a plugin hand editing rights to a custom capability instead of the default manage_options.

Quick start

1. Activate the plugin, then choose Edit Menu in the admin bar.
2. Click a menu item to select it. The shared controls panel opens beside the menu.
3. Rename an item by editing its label. Press Enter to commit or Escape to restore the previous label.
4. Reorder items by dragging menu rows. Top-level items reorder among top-level items; submenu items reorder inside their current parent.
5. Change a top-level icon from the icon picker. Use Dashicons, bundled Bootstrap Icons, "No icon", or a valid WordPress icon value.
6. Hide an item from selected roles with the visibility control. This only changes what those roles see in the menu; it does not block the page URL.
7. Use Reset this item to discard one item's customizations, or Reset all to delete the saved configuration and return to WordPress defaults.
8. Choose Exit Menu Editing when finished. Pending autosaves are flushed before the page reloads.

For the longer walkthrough, see docs/user-guide.md.

Status

v1.0.0 is released on GitHub and ready for WordPress.org submission (release-readiness tracked in .planning/ROADMAP.md). The server core (replay engine, REST API, sanitization) and the editor are done, and all three test layers are green (unit 44, integration 29, E2E 9; phpcs clean; Plugin Check reports no errors on the extracted build zip). The editor uses the click-to-select model with debounced autosave:

• Debounced autosave (~500 ms) on reorder, rename, icon pick, visibility toggle, and per-item reset — no manual Save button; a "Saving… / Saved ✓" status indicator instead. Saves are serialized (single-flight) so a slow request can't overwrite newer edits. Reload only on Exit (which flushes any pending save) and on Reset all.
• Click-to-select with one shared controls panel. No edit chrome until an item is selected: each row shows only a hover/focus-revealed drag handle. Selecting an item opens the shared panel (rename, icon picker for top-level items, per-role visibility, reset-this-item).
• Stable expanded menu while editing. Folded/auto-fold mode is neutralized on entry and re-stripped if common.js reapplies it, so editing always happens against the expanded menu.
• Icons: all four native WordPress forms (dashicon, none, base64 image data-URI, image URL), validated server-side. The picker bundles two sets — dashicons and ~87 curated Bootstrap Icons — with a search filter and a "No icon" option, and is keyboard-accessible (dialog/tablist roles, arrow-key navigation, focus trap) and mobile-sized. Icon changes persist via autosave (covered by E2E: pick → POST carries the icon → survives reload).

See SPEC.md for the durable design and docs/archive/FIXES.md for the historical fix log.

Localization

The plugin uses the maestro text domain and 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). PHP-visible strings use WordPress translation helpers, and the editor receives its UI labels through the localized maestroData.i18n payload so JavaScript controls, dialogs, status messages, and button text are translatable. WordPress.org language packs can still override and extend the bundled catalogs; native-speaker and WordPress Polyglots review is welcome.

Repository layout

• Runtime plugin — maestro.php, includes/, assets/, languages/, readme.txt. This is all that ships to a site.
• WordPress.org listing assets — .wordpress-org/ contains the directory icon (icon.svg, icon-128x128.png, icon-256x256.png), banners (banner-772x250.png, banner-1544x500.png), and screenshots (screenshot-1.png through screenshot-4.png).
• Dev & tooling — tests/, composer.json, package.json, .wp-env.json, playwright.config.ts, phpunit-*.xml.dist, bin/build.sh.
• Docs — docs/user-guide.md (user walkthrough), SPEC.md (durable specification), TESTING.md (how to run each test layer), and docs/archive/FIXES.md (historical fix log).

Install (to a site)

Build a runtime-only zip and upload it under Plugins → Add New → Upload:

bin/build.sh        # writes build/maestro.zip (runtime files only)

Activate it; Edit Menu appears in the admin bar. Never ship the dev tooling inside the installed plugin.

Develop & test

composer install && composer test:unit          # pure unit tests, no WordPress
npm install && npm run env:start                 # boot WordPress + MySQL (Docker)
npm run test:php                                 # PHP integration tests
npm run test:e2e                                 # Playwright end-to-end

See TESTING.md for details and the standalone (non-Docker) paths.

Playground demo (role testing)

A WordPress Playground blueprint (playground/blueprint.json) spins up a throwaway site for trying the editor — including per-role visibility — without a local WordPress. It installs User Switching, creates four test users (editor, author, contributor, subscriber, all password password), activates Maestro, and drops you into edit mode as admin.

npm run playground

This builds the runtime-only plugin, mounts it into Playground, runs the blueprint, and serves at http://127.0.0.1:9400. Hide a menu item from a role in the editor, then use Switch To (admin bar) to view the menu as that user.

Hosted Playground: the Live demo runs the same setup in the browser with no install. It uses playground/blueprint-hosted.json, which installs the plugin straight from this public repo via a git:directory resource (the local blueprint.json mounts it instead).

License

GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.