Plugins to Organize Plugins

Plugins to Organize Plugins

plugin management

My pick is Plugin Notes for notes and Easy Updates Manager for controlling the update process, but I later concluded that plugin grouping is necessary and Plugin Groups is the best one for that purpose.

Describing and writing notes on plugins

  • Plugin Notes | mjangda/plugin-notes is a plugin that I really need and use frequently. Although it has its 1K users, it seems to me that the author does not update it. Fortunately, the plugin still works. The ability to enter and format notes in HTML or Markdown format is very important to me. One of my favorite plugins.

  • Plugin Notes Plus is the first replacement for the previous plugin. It is not perfectly made, but at least it is regularly updated as it has 6K users. I always modify it so that the plugin notes are displayed beneath the plugin description and not in a separate column, and for that there’s the hook plugin-notes-plus_note_placement.

  • Plugin Memorandum is an outdated version of a plugin that attempted to do the same thing as the previous two. Of course, it hasn’t been maintained for a long time and the code is outdated and poor.

Plugin Classification, Grouping and Organization

Plugin Groups is not the most beautiful plugin out there, but it is regularly maintained and it works. It allows you to group your plugins in Admin area, in a very flexible way. It is also available on Github as DavidCramer/plugin-groups. I consider it essential now.

Plugin Organizer is a plugin that allows you to modify the order of plugin loading, disable plugins per post type and add plugin grouping. To achieve all those features, it includes an extra must-use module. However, I’m never using it due to its complicated and confusing user interface and its negative impact on the performance of the admin area.

Plugin Manager was a plugin that was well-designed and used to serve the purpose of grouping plugins, locking and hiding them, and had a nice user-friendly interface. However, it has not been updated in a long time and now causes WordPress to crash. Despite this, it was a great plugin that I enjoyed using. The plugin is also available on Github as sujin2f/Plugin-Manager. U suštini, ovaj je plugin bio masterpiece.

Hiding Plugins

It seems like almost every advanced admin customizer has this option added so I don’t think there is a need for a separate plugin. Customizers that offer this functionality are WP Custom Admin Interface, Admin Menu Editor and Plugin Manager aka Plugin Grouper, for example.

Hide Plugins works perfectly. You can’t hide mu-plugins, but that’s also impossible in other plugins. I am using this one, but only for not-really-scary plugins ;) For scary plugins, I’l use Admin Menu Editor.

Control Plugin Updates

Global WP Update Control

Plugin Update and Auto-update feature has come a long way in WordPress core, but there is still room for improvement. What particularly bothers me is how often the admin area becomes slow due to the numerous remote API calls for checking for new plugin versions. I need to have more control and prevent such a high amount of outgoing HTTP requests.

Easy Updates Manager je detailed configuration system for updating WP and it’s plugins. Very well written, and therefore my winner, ali sad potpuno nepotreban pošto je skoro iste stvari uveo WordPress u core. Mislim da pojedinačna kontrola Plugin updates postoji, ali većina interesantinh mogućnosti je u plaćenoj Pro verziji.

Disable and Hide Updates

It might sound weird, but this is really important after the site is delivered to the client. They usually get confused by a lot of notifications about new plugins, so it’s better to not show anything so they think everything is perfect.

For now, my favourite plugins are the first two - I haven’t decided which one yet.

Disable All WordPress Updates (20K users) completely disables the theme, plugin, and core update checking system, and prevents any notifications from appearing. As it dramatically reduces the number of remote API requests, it also speeds up the overall performance of the admin area. In order to update anything, you will need to temporarily deactivate this plugin. While some people may find that feature useful, I personally don’t like the fact that it displays a small red indicator in the Admin Bar. It’s unreal how fast the admin has become - to the point where the small indicator in the admin bar doesn’t bother me at all now.

Sa druge strane, prilikom logina mi nešto se sporo logujem kada je plugin aktivan.

The Hide Updates plugin (used by 5K users) speeds up admin tasks by blocking requests, not just notifications. Unlike other plugins, this one allows for specific user configuration through a particular hook. By default, the first registered user or the one who installed the site will see the plugin, and no one else will receive update notifications.

Disable Updates by Johan van der Wijk (10K users) does the exact same thing as the previous plugin, “Disable All WordPress Updates”, in the very similar way. One advantage of this plugin is that it completely removes the “Updates” menu item from the Admin menu and there’s no indication that the plugin is active. After checking, I found out that the update is still executes update checks, it just doesn’t show results, so in fact the admin is not speeding up, which disqualifies this plugin as a viable solution.

There are other similar plugins available, but they are less popular and may not be as necessary.

WP Disables Updates: Disable plugins / themes updates radi očekivano a možeš da odabereš šta od wp segment update želiš da isključiš a šta da ostaviš, ali ne i po pojedinačnim pluginovima, tako da je za mene ipak nezamnimljiv.

Technical notes regarding update checks

I need to remind myself that “Disable update notification” is not the same as “Disable update check (HTTP request)”. The related hooks that are associated with these two different operations are:

  • site_transient_update_plugins for “disable update notification”
  • pre_http_request is ideal but also http_request_args which is on a higher level, both for “disable update check”

Very common problem for admin speed is that the system is dialing out to other servers, that are sometimes very slow. A custom solution is to intercept pre_http_request and filter by URL if you want to block something specific.

On some projects I had incredibly slow update servers for the paid plugin “Vendidero” and the only solution was to block all API calls that went to their servers. And that speeded up the Admin, drastically.

Read more about this here and here.

Update Control for Single Plugin

Block Plugin Update is very straightforward and easy plugin for blocking updates of specific plugins, does what it is supposed to do, i baš mi se sviđa.

“Enhanced Plugin Admin” takođe poseduje opciju da se ugasi notifikacija za pojedinačni plugin ali poseduje još mnogo toga što ti možda nije ni potrebno.

Za update control za pojedinačni plugin možeš da jednostavno koristiš i “Hide Plugins” plugin.

Webcraftic Updates Manager: Disable updates, Updates manager, Disable automatic updates poseduje sva živa podešavanja ali ih je dosta u Pro verziji koju šareno i napadno reklamiraju, iako je disable-update per plugin uključeno u Free verziji. Takođe, mnoga podešavanja koja poseduje se sada nalaze u core-u, mislim na “Enable auto-updates” per plugin.

Lock Your Updates Plugins/Themes Manager is if you really need update locking, this can be a plugin for you. Don’t forget that there are much better designed plugin UI for that and it’s really only very basic.

Update Blocker for plugins: rarst/update-blocker by a well respected author ali se konfiguracija radi isključivo kroz PHP hook kod.

Plugin Protector je povučen ali mislim da je radio isto to.

Tiny but extremely useful plugins

Enhanced Plugin Admin prikazuje extra information about last update and similar data, and iako je vrlo sličan sa ostalim pluginovima, ovaj mi se nekako najviše sviđa. Poseduje i predivnu opciju “Hide this plugin’s update notifications” sa kojom možeš da hide (disable) individual plugin update notifications.

Plugins Condition is a cute plugin that shows when plugins were last updated by a beloved Japanese minimalist.

Plugins Page Customize takođe pruža razne dodatne informacije i vrlo je dobar.

Download Plugin is a great plugin if you want to download any plugin from the Admin Plugins page. Similarly, Download Theme is the same, but for themes. There is a third plugin, Download Plugins and Themes from Dashboard, that combines the functionality of the previous two in one plugin, ali još bolji je i WP Anything Downloader

Miscellaneous Plugins

Some plugins I’ve tried but didn’t find useful.

Wb Sticky Notes is a plugin whose functionality did not align with my initial expectations. Most of these “sticky” plugins display sticky notes in the Dashboard, but this one displays it everywhere as if the whole Admin is one big Desktop. This could be useful only if you want to leave an important message for later for yourself or to others aka just like a classic Post-It note.

Grouper is a simple plugin that groups the links of the same author in the Admin menu. It doesn’t serve any other purpose and is not useful for me.


Plugin Activation Info

Previše jednostavno: Plugin Activation Date Nije loš: Plugin Activation Tracker ali previše bloatuje table.


Every time when we activate/deactivate any plugin, WP runs an action that saves the fresh list of plugins to the database. We can hook into that action and filter the list of the plugins as we want. Solving Plugin Dependencies in WordPress


Smarter way to activate/deactivate plugins

Meks Quick Plugin Disabler is used to temporarily disable all active plugins and restore them again, using the simplest button code among plugin list that will remember the disabled plugins and can reactivate them in the same way.

Conflict Finder enables plugin activation toggling, just like the other plugins and it also can toggle the DEBUG_LOG variable and view the debug.log file.

Plugins Deactivator on the ejntaylor/bulk-deactivate repository is a nice plugin that features a separate interface with a “left” and “right” side. One advantage of this plugin is that it allows me to see the list of deactivated plugins when I reactivate them one by one, which is not obvious with other plugins.

date 15. Dec 2016 | modified 29. Dec 2023
filename: Plugins » Organize & Control Plugins