Yesterday afternoon Sarah Pressler retweeted Jono Young’s request for a plugin that would add a submenu to the WordPress’ Admin with the current pages for the site under the Pages menu. This would reduce the number of clicks to get to the page editor.

I was waiting for an upload to finish and I thought, given the code I have laying around from other projects, I’d be able to supply Jono with something passable for what he needed. Though it is far from what I would recommend using, it is a start.

Here is what I did:

• I used get_pages to get a list of WordPress pages the were published.
• While looping through each page I used add_submenu_page to add the page titles under the Pages menu
• I used JavaScript to replace the HREF attribute on the links to link to the page editor

That last step is the hacky part in my opinion. add_submenu_page() asks for a function name to call to build the page for the menu item when it is clicked. In other words, for each item on the Admin menu there is a corresponding function that will show you the page that it results in. But I didn’t want to create a new page, I wanted the link to go to the page editor.

I dug around for five minutes or so and I didn’t see an apparent way to change the links for the page titles (though I’m sure there is a better way if I had the time to continue looking) and so after the page loads I use JavaScript to replace the attributes with links to the page editor.

Nowhere near perfect but, in a pinch, it is one step closer to what Jono wanted. Hopefully he or someone else can build upon and it make something a little more reliable and less hacky.

You can see the source on Github.