Giorgos Sarigiannidis

Slash Admin gathers some common functions that you probably need in most of your websites. The plugin lets you change various different options in a WordPress website, keeps them active even if you switch your theme and helps you create a friendlier Admin Panel for you and your editors.
If you are lost with the many options, here’s a presentation of the plugin’s <a href="https://www.gsarigiannidis.gr/slash-admin-best-features/" rel="nofollow ugc">best features</a>.
<h4>Features</h4>
Frontend
<ul>
<li>Option to point to a static splash page.</li>
<li>Option to convert email addresses characters to HTML entities to block spam bots.</li>
<li>Show EU Cookie Law consent message (check screenshots about available options). Since v.3.0 it also supports WPML for different message per language.</li>
<li>Add a “Loading” animation which hides itself when the page is fully loaded</li>
<li>Enqueue your own Google Web Fonts, with option to load it locally for better performance and privacy</li>
<li>Get rid of the word “Category:” in front of the Archive title (usually needed if your theme uses the_archive_title()).</li>
<li>Add excerpt support to pages.</li>
<li>Enable the use of shortcodes in widgets.</li>
<li>Display a warning for users of old versions of Internet Explorer (IE8 or older). Yes, sadly there are still people who use Internet Explorer 8…</li>
</ul>
Administration
<ul>
<li>Insert Google Analytics tracking code (so as you don’t have to remember re-entering it in case you switch themes in the future)</li>
<li>Hide Site Health from everyone except from a selected Admin (<a href="https://www.gsarigiannidis.gr/how-to-hide-wordpress-site-health-from-everyone-but-you/" rel="nofollow ugc">read more</a>)</li>
<li>Hide ACF options from everyone except from the selected Admin</li>
<li>Since WordPress 5.2 there is a built-in feature that detects when a plugin or theme causes a fatal error on your site, and notifies you with this automated email. By default, it will be sent to the admin email. Slash Admin allows you to override it (you can also add multiple recipients if you like). <a href="https://www.gsarigiannidis.gr/how-to-hide-wordpress-site-health-from-everyone-but-you/" rel="nofollow ugc">Read more</a></li>
<li>Change the address that receives the Plugin and Theme auto-update email notifications</li>
<li>Make WordPress respect the order of the tags you insert in a post (<a href="https://www.gsarigiannidis.gr/wordpress-post-tags-order" rel="nofollow ugc">read more</a>)</li>
<li>Limit the number of revisions that WordPress keeps for each post (keeps the database cleaner)</li>
<li>Prevent Post Updates and Deletion After a Set Period. Useful if you have many editors or in cases where an editor’s account is compromised, adding spam code to the posts (by disallowing editing of older posts you limit the damage)</li>
<li>Enable Jetpack development mode</li>
<li>Move Jetpack share and like buttons</li>
<li>Maintenance mode. If checked, non-Admins will not be able to acess the WordPress backend and they will see a customizable message instead. Useful if you want to perform some maintenance work to your website and you don’t want your Editors to add or modify the content before you finish. Admins are not affected and they can always login as usual.</li>
</ul>
Login screen
<ul>
<li>Add your custom logo at the WordPress log-in screen</li>
<li>Make the login screen logo (custom or default) linking to your website’s homepage instead of wordpress.org</li>
<li>After login, redirect users at the homepage instead of their profile page</li>
<li>Disable the Admin Bar for all users except Administrators. Applies only to the front-end. It’s useful if you want your site to be visible only to logged-in users (e.g. during developement phase), but you don’t want them to access the dashboard or get confused with the admin bar</li>
<li>Add your custom CSS to the login screen to completely change its appearance</li>
</ul>
Non-admins
<ul>
<li>Hide unnecessary options from the Admin menu for non admins (so editors won’t get overwhelmed with options that have no meaning for the current website).</li>
<li>Disable tags and categories</li>
<li>Hide specific pages from non admins. For example, you might not want your editors to have access to the static frontpage, the blog page or pages that you use as page templates.</li>
<li>Allow editors to manage Menus and Widgets and access some other appearance settings previously acessible only to admins (for example, you might want to give your client the option to modify the website’s menu, but you would rather avoid making him/her an administrator).</li>
<li>Hide notices about updating WordPress and other plugins for all users except from Admins (sometimes clients get confused with those notices and think that there is something wrong with the website).</li>
</ul>
White label backend
<ul>
<li>Change the “Howdy” message at the top right corner of the admin (both backend and logged-in frontend)</li>
<li>Change the default footer text at the admin</li>
<li>Replace the WordPress logo at the top left corner of the admin bar with your own (both backend and logged-in frontend)</li>
<li>Replace the default Welcome message at the Dashboard with your own</li>
<li>Add a Dashboard Widget to provide general or commercial information to your clients (for example: your contact info or links to support documentation)</li>
<li>Add your own custom CSS for the Admin area</li>
</ul>
Performance
<ul>
<li>Disable Emojis</li>
<li>Disable wp-embed script from the frontend or load it conditionally</li>
<li>DNS prefetching notifies the client that there are assets we’ll need later from a specific URL (outside our website’s domain) so the browser can resolve the DNS as quickly as possible.</li>
<li>Link prefetching and prerendering. Link prefetching is a browser mechanism, which utilizes browser idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future. A web page provides a set of prefetching hints to the browser, and after the browser is finished loading the page, it begins silently prefetching specified documents and stores them in its cache. When the user visits one of the prefetched documents, it can be served up quickly out of the browser’s cache. Prerendering downloads and renders the entire page and hides it from the user until it is requested, therefore, it should be used with caution.</li>
</ul>
Shortcodes
<ul>
<li>If you manually include email addresses in your posts, you should consider disguising them in order to “fool” e-mail harvesters (check FAQ for details).</li>
<li>Show a telephone number in a way that it is clickable. When clicked, if you are on a mobile device it opens the phone’s dialer and if you are on a desktop computer it prompts to make a call via a related program (e.g. Skype).</li>
<li>If you develop your site on localhost or on a temporary URL, you might want to avoid absolute URLs inside posts and pages. That way you don’t need to update your links after migrating to your actual domain (check FAQ for details). </li>
</ul>
Development functions
<ul>
<li>Using <code>slash_dump()</code> instead of <code>var_dump()</code> will wrap the output in <code><pre></pre></code> tags, for better readability. <code>slash_admin_dump()</code> does the same thing, only this time the output is only visible to admins (can be handy if you want to debug a live site).</li>
<li>Show warnings if the site is on air and debug mode is still on and if the site is on localhost and debug mode is off. Also, show warning if the website is on air and you have chosen to hide it from Search Engines.</li>
</ul>
Notifications
Slash Admin displays the following notifications:
<ul>
<li>A list with the users who logged in during the past 15 minutes (except from you, obviously)</li>
<li>A warning when debug mode is enabled (you should enable it when developing, but disable it when the site goes live)</li>
<li>A warning when your site is hidden from search engines</li>
</ul>

Slash Admin

Great set of features! Using it on Multisite activated on each domain, and each has its own settings.
Tip for those hard to remove elements:
Find its CSS selector - in browser right-click on it, select Inspect
When you have it, go to Slash Admin "White Label" tab.
Enter the CSS in the "Custom CSS" box, Save.
eg: I want to get rid of wordpress icons in Admin bar menus
div.blavatar { display: none; }
Nice.
Thankyou Giorgo :)



Great set of features!

This is a neat plugin. I wish there was a way to further fine-tune some options but for what it does it does it very well. Easy to use and well thought out!



Dig it!

Dozens of settings aiming at creating a friendlier administration environment for both Administrators and Editors.

Themeisle

Add a maintenance page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance, add a coming soon page for a new website or create a landing page for an existing site. User with admin rights gets full access to the blog including the front end.
Activate the plugin and your blog is in maintenance-mode, works and only registered users with enough rights can see the front end. You can use a date with a countdown timer for visitor information or set a value and unit for information.
Also works with WordPress Multisite installs (each blog from the network has its own maintenance settings).
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Fully customizable (change colors, texts and backgrounds).</li>
<li>Subscription form (export emails to .csv file).</li>
<li>Countdown timer (remaining time).</li>
<li>Contact form (receive emails from visitors).</li>
<li>Coming soon page;</li>
<li>Landing page templates;</li>
<li>WordPress multisite;</li>
<li>Responsive design;</li>
<li>Social media icons;</li>
<li>Works with any WordPress theme;</li>
<li>SEO options;</li>
<li>Exclude URLs from maintenance;</li>
<li>Bot functionality to collect the emails in a friendly and efficient way;</li>
<li>GDPR Ready;</li>
</ul>
<h4>Bugs, technical hints or contribute</h4>
Please give us feedback, contribute and file technical bugs on <a href="https://github.com/andrianvaleanu/WP-Maintenance-Mode" rel="nofollow ugc">GitHub Repo</a>.
<h4>Credits</h4>
Developed by <a href="https://themeisle.com" rel="nofollow ugc">Themeisle</a>
<h4>What’s Next</h4>
If you like this plugin, then consider checking out our other projects:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://optimole.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Optimole</a> – Optimole is your all-in-one image optimization solution for WordPress & beyond.</li>
<li><a href="https://wpshout.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">WPShout</a> – In-Depth WordPress Tutorials for Developers</li>
<li><a href="https://revive.social/" rel="nofollow ugc">Revive Social</a> – Revive Old Posts helps you keep your content alive and in front the audiences that matter.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.codeinwp.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">CodeinWP</a> – CodeinWP stands for all-things-WordPress. From web design to freelancing and from development to business, your questions are covered.</li>
<li><a href="https://domainwheel.com" rel="nofollow ugc">DomainWheel</a> – Free Short Website name generator, with the help of AI, for instant ideas.</li>
</ul>
Check-out <a href="https://themeisle.com/blog/" title="Themeisle blog" rel="nofollow ugc">our blog</a> to learn from our <a href="https://themeisle.com/blog/category/wordpress/reviews/" title="WordPress Reviews" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress Reviews</a> and see other <a href="https://themeisle.com/blog/category/wordpress-plugins/" title="WordPress Plugins Comparisons" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress plugins</a>.

LightStart – Maintenance Mode, Coming Soon and Landing Page Builder

I discovered some times ago that there is an add for Otter Blocks in Custom CSS setting in Gutenberg. I did not investigate and the last update of Lighstart force to install Otter Blocks when you go to Gutenberg management for Maintenance Page. Deactivating Lightstart resolves the problem. So don’t install this plugin, there is a bunch of alternative.

Add Ad for Otter in Custom CSS setting in Gutenberg


Initially I installed the plugin and there was an "optimize images" checkbox (enabled by default), that I did not look carefully into. After the plugin was installed, I noticed that some kind of optimization plugin had been installed. That was fine as I felt it was my mistake for not looking into that more carefully,



Today I find another plugin on our site, a plugin called "Otter Blocks".



This is quite a shady practice - probably done to boost the installs and visibility of the other plugins.


Installs other plugins without notice


After installing a plugin that initially appears uncomplicated and straightforward, you are immediately greeted with aggressive promotions for Otter – Page Builder Blocks & Extensions for Gutenberg. In a short span, a new message emerges: "Elevate your content's visibility with ease! Discover Revive Old Posts, a state-of-the-art plugin from the creators of Otter – Page Builder Blocks & Extensions for Gutenberg. Effortlessly reshare both old and new content on social media platforms, attracting unprecedented traffic."



Given that "unprecedented traffic" seems to be just a catchy phrase coined by marketers to lure in users, the entire promotional tactic can be overbearing for those seeking a clutter-free experience. Such aggressive marketing feels intrusive, disregards user preferences, and does not align with a community-oriented ethos.


Bombarded with excessive promotions


This plugin installs other crap ware on your site. Stay away.


Installs crapware


Theoretical this is a great plugin allowing users to design and change their "Maintenance" page in Gutenberg. But in reality it hung my WP admin upon activation. And the site is not available. Too many re-directs.Also the so called templates do install an extra plugin "Otter" which might be handy. But a little confusing. 


Looks great, but has issues

Easy Drag & Drop Page Builder that adds a splash page to your site that it's perfect for a coming soon page, maintenance or landing page.

Slash Admin vs LightStart – Maintenance Mode, Coming Soon and Landing Page Builder