While I love the new Network Admin pages, some of the opinionated design built into them is making my work a little harder as a network admin.
Here’s a small example. One of the headaches for an admin is users losing their email invitations, not knowing where their spam folder is, or occasionally account creation emails getting caught in some kind of institutional spam filter.
I had installed a plugin to help me manage those types of issues: Unconfirmed – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
The unconfirmed plugin by was built by Boone Gorges and the CUNY Academic Commons team because stuff like this happens all the time on multisites like Pressbooks and especially multisites that are used by institutions. The problem is, with the new dashboards that Pressbooks has created, they have removed the link to get to this plugins admin screen.
I can still get there, but I have to remember the URL.
I’m trying to use this as a illustrative example of what I think is a larger problem. Which is that the new Pressbooks Network Manager and User Manager pages are a little bit opinionated, and where they diverge from default WordPress behavior new admins might not even be aware of the choices that were made.
Another small example that probably only effects me. When I am doing theme development, sometimes I like to use the theme editor function in WordPress. In the admin screens, Pressbooks has removed that link even for super-administrators. I totally get why in your managed sites, you don’t want school admins messing around with themes, but I kind of miss that.
So what I am asking for is not so much a fix for any one issue, but instead just to increase awareness that Open Source Pressbooks users might have plugins, tools, or workflows that are a little different than the SAAS managed areas. If you want to hide all plugins but Pressbooks-approved plugins on your networks, would you consider building that part into a separate plugin, instead of into core Pressbooks?
This is the issue on github that started me thinking about the problem.