Ok, in case somebody else stumbles in here wanting to clean up their admin, I decided to follow up. If you decide to do any of this, make sure you backup your database and files first (duh!).
Menu Clutter:
Super easy! Everything I needed was contained in the admin_pages table. It's probably easier to export the table's contents, make your changes, then import. But you could also make your changes directly in phpMyAdmin (I used Sequel Pro). To get all the menu lists together, sort columns by menu_key.
To alter the order of the drop-down lists, simply change the sort_order value.
To move an item from one list to another, just change the menu_key. I moved "Who's Online" to the Reports menu by changing menu_key from "tools" to "reports". Easy!
To kill an item entirely (never see it again), simply change display_on_menu from "Y" to "N". I killed Recording Artists, Record Companies, Music Genres on the Extras menus.
Upshot is that now my Tools menu is tight little list of items I use frequently, and in an order that makes sense to me.
Template/CSS changes:
I tend to keep my browser windows maximized. I don't go "full-screen", but I keep the browser at max width/height. When I open config settings or go to the catalog to update products, it's not super easy to scan across to find the button that correlates to what I want.
To fix that, I simply applied a max-width to the admin css (/admin/includes/css/bootstrap.min.css)
FOUND THIS:
body{margin:0}
CHANGED TO:
body{margin:0;max-width:1400px}
Header clutter:
Three things bothered me about the bar that runs across the top of Admin pages.
#1. On the far right is a list of links that I simply do not need.
Admin Home: I simply click on the ZC logo on top right for that.
Store Front: I go there directly, never from admin.
Support: Same as above.
To kill these, I opened admin/includes/header.php, found that list, and deleted the unwanted items. To do that, find where the list begins (<ul class="nav nav-pills upperMenu">) and delete the ones you don't want (<li> xxxx </li>).
#2. Information I don't need, dead center of the top bar (the date/time, my IP, etc). I killed this in the header file as well (admin/includes/header.php).
FOUND:
Code:
<div class="col-xs-12 col-sm-12 col-md-6 col-lg-6">
<?php
echo((strtoupper(substr(PHP_OS, 0, 3)) == 'WIN') ? iconv('ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8', strftime(ADMIN_NAV_DATE_TIME_FORMAT, time())) : strftime(ADMIN_NAV_DATE_TIME_FORMAT, time())); //windows does not "do" UTF-8...so a manual conversion is necessary
echo ' ' . date("O", time()) . ' GMT'; // time zone
echo ' [' . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . ']'; // current admin user's IP address
echo '<br />';
echo version_compare(PHP_VERSION, '5.3.0', 'lt') ? php_uname('n') : gethostname(); //what server am I working on? // NOTE: gethostbyname only available since PHP 5.3.0
echo ' - ' . date_default_timezone_get(); //what is the PHP timezone set to?
$loc = setlocale(LC_TIME, 0);
if ($loc !== FALSE) echo ' - ' . $loc; //what is the locale in use?
?>
</div>
REPLACED WITH:
Code:
<div class="col-xs-12 col-sm-12 col-md-6 col-lg-6">
<?php
echo ' ';
?>
</div>
Adding Quick Links to my admin page:
Removing the date/time/IP info in #2 of Header Clutter above opened up real estate. So I went back to that and inserted my list there.
FOUND (same passage edited above):
Code:
<div class="col-xs-12 col-sm-12 col-md-6 col-lg-6">
<?php
echo ' ';
?>
</div>
REPLACED WITH:
Code:
<div class="col-xs-12 col-sm-12 col-md-6 col-lg-6">
<?php
echo '<p style="text-align:center;"><strong>QUICK LINKS: </strong><a href="backup_mysql.php" class="headerLink">Backup</a>, <a href="easypopulate_4.php" class="headerLink">Easy Pop</a>, <a href="developers_tool_kit.php" class="headerLink">Dev Tools</a></p>';
?>
</div>
Easy as pie!
+++++++++++++++
UPSHOT:
Ok so I wasted a couple hours figuring all this out, but man o man am I feeling liberated! I'm no longer afraid of making changes to the admin. So long as I keep those changes cosmetic and make only very, very minor code alterations that affect *only* cosmetics, I can change thinks that bother me deeply.
Another nice discovery was finding the language file (/admin/includes/languages/english.php). For years it has bothered me that the Tools menu and the bar above both provide a link to look up your server info, but each calls it something different. In the menu it's "Server/Version Info" and on the bar it's "Version". So I used the language file to change the title on the bar (HEADER_TITLE_VERSION) to "Server Info" to make it more instinctive for me.
Next up (if I ever find the time for it), I'm going to rename/sort/move items around on the Configuration menu. Every single time I need something over there I have to relearn it all.
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