Priceless Pick: Admin Notices Manager

Every WordPress users has at least one favorite plugin. They’re the tools you’ll go to for every project, that you depend on for quality and consistency. As such, you’ll hear every type of recommendation, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins, page builders, and more niche examples. Admin Notices Manager has a specific focus, yet we believe it to be a priceless pick among WordPress plugins.

Our goal with the Priceless Pick series is to help you find valuable plugins you might otherwise not pay attention to. To avoid any potential conflicts, we only recommend free plugins. We also get deep insights from the plugin’s developers into their processes, how they come up with these products, and their tips for getting the most out of using them. 

This post will look at why Admin Notices Manager is a priceless pick, so let’s start with what the plugin is.

Introducing Admin Notices Manager

WordPress has a built-in admin notification system. These messages pop up when you make site changes or if there’s an issue you need to be aware of. This can be simple tasks such as updating or deleting a post, but developers use them for all sorts of reasons:

For some users, admin notices can be tiresome to interact with. In some cases, your only experience with them might be nudges to upgrade to a premium license, install a ‘companion’ plugin, or connect a third-party account.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve trained yourself to ignore most admin notices:

Unfortunately, there’s no standardized system for implementing admin notices. This is a shame since they can help you keep up with how your site operates.

Admin Notices Manager looks to help you ‘curate’ your WordPress notifications. It brings them out of the dashboard and into the admin menu at the top of the screen. This gives you a ‘feed’ that lets you read notices in the order, while keeping the dashboard clean:

It’s not flashy, it’s not groundbreaking, and it doesn’t fundamentally change the way in which WordPress works—but the small change it makes does improve the User Experience (UX).

Admin Notices Manager: From the Developer

The plugin wasn’t released with any commercial goals in mind. It was created by Melapress (a team that typically focuses on WordPress security solutions) to make the team’s work easier:

So we needed something that would allow us to view the admin notices at any time we want without having to take action on them and without deleting them. When we looked for other plugins we mostly found plugins that remove them completely. So we developed our own simple solution. 

Robert Abela, CEO and Founder of Melapress

Once they realized the value of the plugin, they decided to release it for free and provide updates:

“…we focus on security products because that is what we know about. The Admin Notices Manager plugin was more of “scratching my own itch” moment. Our website is built with WordPress and at one point we had too many admin notices that we needed to act on but couldn’t do it there and then…

A for-profit company releasing free tools for the benefit of the WordPress community and ecosystem is an excellent way to give back. That’s one of the reasons the plugin is a priceless pick for us.

Key Features

Admin Notices Manager is a lightweight plugin, which can be a plus or a downside depending on the type of user you are. It hyper-focuses on a few key features with little in the way of customization options:

• Moves admin notices from the dashboard to the admin menu. Instead of seeing notices pile up in the dashboard, they now get a new menu. It’s a standard WordPress menu so it fits perfectly within the core experience.
• Hides notices until you click on the Admin notices button. You don’t have to deal with notices until you’re ready. When you click on the dedicate button, you’ll see all recent notices in chronological order.
• Configures what notices to exclude or hide. You can set the plugin to continue displaying specific notices in the dashboard so you don’t miss them. You can also configure what notices to ignore completely.
• Configures which users to hide notifications from. You can also set the plugin so it only shows notifications to specific user roles. Alternatively, you can choose which users shouldn’t see admin notices.

That’s it! The developers talk about how they want the plugin to be straightforward and easy to use. It handles notices with custom settings and it gives you control over who has access to that information—simple!

How Admin Notices Manager Works

The plugin is very easy to set up and use (which all plugins should aspire to be). Once you install and activate the plugin, it automatically sets up the new notice manager widget in the admin bar:

As activity takes place on your site, you’ll see the Admin notices count go up. You can click on it at any time to see what you’ve missed:

If you navigate to Settings > Admin Notices, you can go ahead and configure the display settings for the different types of admin notices. That includes success, error, warning, informational, and non-standard notices. 

The plugin enables you to configure each of these categories. You can choose to move those notices to the admin bar, hide them altogether, or leave them showing in the dashboard:

There are also WordPress system notices (such as plugin installation confirmations), which the plugin doesn’t move to the admin menu so you don’t miss them. Of course, you can change how the plugin treats these notifications:

Admin Notices Manager also includes a couple of cosmetic customization settings. These are simple options to change the notification sidebar background and whether to display notices using a sidebar or a popup:

Personally, I don’t like the look of popups and feel they have less to offer in the way of UX. However, you have the option to customize the approach to your liking.

In my experience, you can use the plugin with its default settings and it’ll be just fine. This is very much a plug-and-play plugin.

What Makes Admin Notices Manager a Priceless Pick

A priceless pick is always going to be a personal judgment. The WP Mayor team goes over suggestions from personal experience and your recommendations in case there are any amazing plugins we’re not familiar with (it happens!). If you have a plugin that you swear you can’t live without (and it’s free), let us know and it could feature in this series!

Back to Admin Notices Manager—it’s simple in how it works, and in the words of the developer, is a low-maintenance plugin. If a user requests a valuable feature, the team looks for ways to implement it. Beyond this, the plugin doesn’t get many updates, because of its simple functionality.

This is a priceless pick for us because it improves a small part of the WordPress experience and doesn’t pack in unnecessary features. What’s more, Melapress provides this to the community for free with no purpose but to make your work a bit easier.

…it is a very simple plugin with a very specific role – move the admin notices to a separate screen / viewer, and it does it. Of course, once we developed it we have uploaded it on the repo, to make it available to everyone who uses WordPress…

Robert Abela

While the user base of the plugin is small, it manages to change how those few thousands of people interact with WordPress on a daily basis. Not bad for a quick tool originally made for internal use! The developers have actively chosen not to promote the plugin either, even on their website. This is so it’s seen as a useful tool in its own right rather than a part of the official product line.

In a nutshell, if you’ve ever found yourself looking at a notice on the WordPress dashboard asking you to leave a review or buy a license for the umpteenth time, you’ll likely enjoy using Admin Notices Manager!

Final Thoughts

There are heated debates over the best plugin for any niche. I’ve even seen some of those debates almost come to blows (particularly among SEO people)!

In some cases, though, there’s no debate as to what the best plugin is in a tiny niche because there’s no competition. Like a previous priceless pick (Better Search Replace), few developers look to handling admin notices because there’s no monetization opportunity. This benefits Melapress, because they have an excellent plugin that almost every WordPress website owner could utilize.