Maestro lets you orchestrate the appearance of the WordPress admin menu.

Instead of a separate settings screen, Maestro turns the admin menu into something you edit in place — right where it lives. Toggle Edit Menu from the admin bar, and the menu becomes editable. Click a menu item to rename it, hide it from selected user roles, or change its icon. Drag submenu items and whole menu groups to reorder them.

Try Maestro right here. Launch a demo in WordPress Playground — it boots a throwaway site with the plugin active in edit mode, plus User Switching and test users (editor, author, contributor, subscriber; password password) so you can try per-role visibility by switching to another user’s account.

What you can do — as a site administrator

Maestro’s enhancements are only activated for logged-in users with an Administrator role. They can:

Rename any top-level or submenu item — just click the label.
Reorder items by dragging (top-level items among themselves, submenu items within their parent), or with the keyboard (Alt+Arrow).
Swap icons on top-level items. The icon picker offers Dashicons and bundled Bootstrap Icons with search. It accepts any of WordPress’s four native icon forms (dashicon, “none”, base64 image data-URI, or an image URL).
Hide items from chosen roles — including administrators. Custom roles registered by other plugins (User Role Editor, Members, etc.) appear automatically.
Hide items from specific people, by name, when a role is the wrong unit — one person on a shared role who doesn’t need a particular tool. Search for someone in the visibility popover and add them; a parent’s sub-items can be hidden per person too, with the parent left visible. Like every other hide in Maestro, this is cosmetic only: the page still loads by URL for anyone authorized to see it.
Reset a single item to its WordPress default, or reset everything at once.

Changes are global — one configuration applies to everyone. Your custom menu configuration is stored as a sparse delta (just the differences) layered over the menu WordPress builds on each load. Nothing is rebuilt or duplicated, so a reset simply removes the delta, and the original menu returns.

Important: visibility is cosmetic, not access control

Hiding a menu item only declutters the menu. The underlying admin page still loads for anyone who knows or types its URL if they’re authorized to see it. That’s because a page’s own registered capability is the true lock. Maestro operates on the menu (presentation), which is a different plane from authorization.

If you need to actually prevent access, pair Maestro with a capability manager like PublishPress Capabilities**. It’s menu-aware, and its Pro tier can block admin pages by URL.

The maestro_capability filter lets such a plugin hand editing rights to a custom capability instead of the default manage_options.

Accessibility and localization

The editor is keyboard-operable end to end — select with Enter/Space, reorder with Alt+Arrow, and every move and save is announced to screen
readers. Modified items carry a non-color indicator with screen-reader text, so their state is never indicated by color alone.

Maestro uses the maestro-menu-editor text domain and ships a translation template plus starter language packs for Spanish (es_ES), German (de_DE), Japanese (ja), French (fr_FR), Portuguese – Brazil (pt_BR), and Italian (it_IT). WordPress.org language packs override and extend these; native-speaker and WordPress Polyglots reviews are welcome.

Architecture (for developers)

Config — reads/writes/sanitizes a single option (maestro_config) holding only the deltas. Reset = delete the option; the natural menu returns automatically.
Replay — on a late admin_menu pass, applies rename/icon/visibility to the $menu/$submenu globals and reorders submenus. Top-level order uses the core custom_menu_order + menu_order filters. Resilient to missing slugs (orphans are skipped) and new items (appended at the end).
Rest — maestro/v1/config (GET/POST/DELETE), capability-gated, X-WP-Nonce.
The editor JS is driven by a localized model (with DOM ids), not DOM scraping, and diffs against captured pristine defaults so the stored config stays sparse.
Localized editor labels are passed from PHP to JavaScript in maestroData.i18n; the runtime zip includes the bundled POT template and starter catalogs.

Performance & footprint

Maestro is built to stay out of the way:

Zero extra database queries on the front end. Every hook is admin-only, so the plugin is completely inert for public page loads and logged-out visitors.
One extra query on an admin page — a single, non-autoloaded option (maestro_config), read once per request and cached. With a persistent object cache (Redis / Memcached) that drops to zero.
Nothing added to alloptions. Because the option is not autoloaded, it adds no weight to the bundle WordPress loads on every request.
Minimal storage. One wp_options row, created only when you first save a change — a fresh install stores nothing. No custom tables, no post or user meta, no transients, no cron jobs. Uninstalling deletes that single row.
Small install — roughly a 115 KB download. Menu changes are applied in memory during the admin_menu pass, not through extra queries.

(Figures are a v1.4.1 snapshot.)

Known limits / deferred to v2

Reparenting (moving an item between a top-level position and a submenu) is not included. Top-level items reorder among top-level items, and submenu items reorder within their current parent. Reparenting needs hand-splicing of the globals plus parent_file/submenu_file highlighting fixes — a known minefield, parked deliberately.
Separators are preserved in place but not yet add/move/delete-able; their generated slugs (separator1…) have no stable identity to key against.
Renaming an item drops any core-appended count badge (e.g., pending comments) from that label, since the badge lives inside the title string.
Submenu sort relies on items registering by the late admin_menu pass; a plugin that registers submenus on an unusually late hook may not be captured.

Credits

Bundled Bootstrap Icons are © The Bootstrap Authors, licensed under the MIT License. They are recoloured to WordPress
menu grey and embedded as data-URIs; see bin/generate-bootstrap-icons.mjs.

Support This Plugin

If Maestro saves you time or brings you or your clients the joy of a tidy admin menu, you can support its ongoing maintenance through GitHub Sponsors.

Maestro: The Inline Admin Menu Editor