FV Clone Screen Options

For years we offered our clients a wonderful plugin we had written ourselves, called FV Edit Templates.

What FV Edit Templates did was provide a custom edit screen. We found the default Wordpress edit screens far too complex and confusing. While originally the Edit Templates were a client driven project, we found that we preferred them ourselves.

Then along came Wordpress 2.7. Finally an admin interface worthy of the Wordpress project. But our Edit Templates were written for the 2.5 and lower Wordpress. We gave Edit Templates up reluctantly and encouraged our clients to customise their own edit screens.

For our high end clients we even went in there and copied our standard settings across all users via the database with a remote MySQL client (in our case SequelPro). That worked well enough but was a pain in the neck for the several Typepad to Wordpress jobs we release almost every week.

So we finally decided to sit down and do something about it.

FV Clone Screen Options let's you go into a weblog and configure all of the Screen Options (Screen Options exist for Posts, Pages and the Dashboard) just as you like and then clone them across all users.

Even new registered users on your site will get these settings.

A huge time saver. Enjoy!

FV Clone Screen Options Screen. Simple and effective.

Advanced

What values are actually cloned?

Screen Options are stored as a user meta values with following names, so that's what this plugin is cloning for all the users:

metaboxhidden_post
closedpostboxes_post
screen_layout_post
wp_metaboxorder_post

metaboxhidden_page
closedpostboxes_page
screen_layout_page
wp_metaboxorder_page

metaboxhidden_dashboard
closedpostboxes_dashboard
screen_layout_dashboard
wp_metaboxorder_dashboard

wp_usersettings

edit_per_page
manageeditcolumnshidden
edit_pages_per_page
manageeditpagescolumnshidden

Download

Plugin can be downloaded from Wordpress.org. Don't forget to checkout our Wordpress.org plugin page too.

16 comments on “FV Clone Screen Options”

01

Will class styles be cloned that are in the style.css file?

Dave T at March 9th, 2010 around 10:40 am
02

Absolutely perfect, thanks. No more confusing your users with endless amounts of meta boxes.

Joris Witteman at April 28th, 2010 around 9:18 am
03

Thanks for the kind words, Joris. FV Clone really helps make Wordpress more approachable for non-technical, non-Internet generation users.

alec at April 29th, 2010 around 1:02 pm
04

Does this only work for certain screens? I found that when I went to add a new post, and changed the columns to 1, and cloned that across users, it worked; however, when I went to view all posts, and turned off comments, and changed the posts per page to 500, this did NOT work across all users.

Morgan at June 15th, 2010 around 2:12 pm
05

Hello Morgan,

we are looking into making it work with all the screens. Or as much as possible.

As a quick fix, we added the screens you mentioned to new version – 0.2.1. You can update now and start cloning.

Thanks,
Martin

Martin at June 17th, 2010 around 6:42 am
06

When a new user signs up what will their screen options be? Will they be the same as the cloned or will I have to go and re-clone every time a new person signs up?

Michael at June 28th, 2010 around 6:24 am
07

Hello Michael,

yes, this is one of the core features. I guess we should promote it better.

Thank you for you interest in our plugin,
Martin

Martin at June 28th, 2010 around 9:44 am
08

with wordpress 3.0 you can set up custom post types.
can I use FV Clone Screen Option for all custom post types? I have a new post type “Picture”. Now I’d like to clone this type for all users.

Thanks for your help!

TIMIT

TIMIT at June 30th, 2010 around 3:48 am
09

Hello Timit,

thank you for your interest in our plugin. Please check out the new version (0.2.2), we added support for the custom post types.

Martin

Martin at July 1st, 2010 around 5:32 am
10

I cloned the screen options and sure enough only those options I selected showed up on users pages. Problem is that users can still click on Screen Options near the top right and select to show all of the options that I do not want them to see…basically overriding the whole plug in. Am I missing something? Thanks

Joe at August 1st, 2010 around 2:19 pm
11

Hi Joe,

The focus of Screen Options is not to take choice away from the end user but to give him/her a good default configuration.

We might add a preference to disable Screen Options for non-Admin users (we put clients at Editor level as a general rule).

Would you be able to donate to help us make this feature possible?

alec at August 1st, 2010 around 3:28 pm
12

Hi, I am trying to clone my admin screen which includes a Dashboard Notepad widget and wp-stats. Neither of these show up on a contributor dashboard. Are these values outside the scope of your plugin or do I have another issue going on? I checked it in basic WP theme and same lack of cloning going on.

thanks

Andy at August 9th, 2010 around 6:07 am
13

Hi Andy,

We aren’t cloning the dashboard at this point. We’ll keep these changes in mind for a future update. Thanks for the suggestion.

If you’d like to accelerate development of these features, feel free to contribute to the project.

alec at August 9th, 2010 around 6:28 am
14

Thanks for the prompt reply. The reason I asked, they appear as screen options on the admin dashboard along with the usual suspects of comments etc. Have I misunderstood what the plugin does.

Andy at August 9th, 2010 around 6:31 am
15

Pages and posts editing environment were our concern with this plugin.

alec at August 9th, 2010 around 6:34 am
16

Hello Andy,

actually our plugin is cloning the dashboard settings too. I added a FAQ section with list of what’s cloned.

If you are missing some widgets on dashboard as a contributor, I would guess that the appear only to higher level users.

Thanks,
Martin

Martin at August 11th, 2010 around 7:30 am