Update: This post is followed up with more information here.

The new admin interface in WordPress 2.7 is a great success, and improves the admin area navigation by leaps and bounds from WordPress 2.6. It certainly reduces the number of mouse clicks needed to move around from section to section, and menu items are more accessible than they were before.

New to WordPress 2.7 are two API’s that are very useful. Firstly, you can now add your own custom items to the admin dashboard, you can see more information here in the Dashboard Widgets API. You can also now add your own Plugin options to existing parts of the admin panels, rather than having to create your own custom admin option pages from scratch. This is controlled by the Settings API.

One thing I haven’t been able to find though, is how to access, and add your own custom menu items to, the Shortcuts menu, in the header bar of the WordPress 2.7 admin area. This would be an excellent place to add to the Shortcuts menu and to add other ‘quick access’ type menus.

New quick access ‘Shortcuts’ menu in WordPress

I have a few other WordPress Plugins currently in development that would specifically benefit from being in the admin header area, but have yet to track it down. Perhaps it is buried somewhere in the new Settings API. Does anyone know where?

I am sure I have seen somewhere in the WordPress Plugin developer documentation, a mention of hooking into the Shortcuts menu. But, it neglected to state how!!

See link at the bottom of the post for information on how to download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, or just go straight to the Microsoft Visual Studio site here.

The next major release of Microsoft’s Visual Studio development environment is apparently going to be developed with the front end GUI written in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). Much of Visual Studio will still probably be written in C++, there will be significant portions of it developed with C# and WPF. WPF as many of you may know is the new Windows Forms API that is set to supersede the current version that has been around since the .NET 1.0 framework was released. Although there are other existing fully fledged applications developed in WPF, one of which is Microsoft’s Expression Blend 2, Visual Studio 2010 is certainly going to be the largest application that makes use of the new WPF technology. WPF has attracted a lot of attention over the last year or so as it is based on a completely different structure to the more traditional Windows forms. Here is a run down of just a few of the features available to WPF developers:

• 2D and 3D support baked directly into WPF.
• New and more flexible structure for handling events (via ‘Routed Events’).
• All Form elements are vector based and so resize to the parent container without loss of quality.
• Many new layout controls for a much more flexible UI. Things like fluid layouts (similar to web applications) can be developed very easily).
• Separation of the UI design from the code behind. The UI is designed using a new language called XAML (pronounced ‘zammel’).

This means that you will have some cool IDE tools available in Visual Studio 2010 such as being able to resize the code window (zooming in and out) rather than having to select a specific pixel size for your fonts. continue