In an ever-growing WordPress ecosystem, both the number and scale of companies using WordPress for their online operations are expanding rapidly. Providing your client’s visitors with a usable, accessible and good-looking frontend to their website is usually concern number 1. But should it be? Often, the usability of the WordPress backend is overlooked by developers, and choices pondered on by core developers for months are negated by developers overloading the admin panel with useless menu items, options and data — resulting in a complete lack of insight.
In this talk, I will discuss with you the need of building WordPress websites and web applications that are not only usable to its visitors, but also to its users — be it administrators, content editors or developers. I will walk you through the why and how of improving your WordPress backend experience using plugins and custom code (specifically, the menu API and the columns API), lead by my experience as a developer for clients and as a former co-author of the Admin Columns plugin.