DevAgent Admin Workspace

DevAgent Admin Workspace helps agencies, site owners, and administrators create focused WordPress admin workspaces for clients, editors, collaborators, and non-technical teams.

Each workspace can combine a custom dashboard, quick actions, role and capability management, an adapted admin menu, a validated start page, and clear instructions for the people who maintain the site.

The plugin works inside the native WordPress administrator. It does not replace wp-admin, load a separate application, or treat CSS menu hiding as security. WordPress roles and capabilities remain the source of truth for what every user can actually do.

Why use a workspace instead of separate admin tools?

Many WordPress tools focus on one layer at a time: editing roles, hiding menus, changing dashboard widgets, or applying white-label branding. DevAgent Admin Workspace connects the operational parts that belong together:

• Define what a role can do through guided questions or advanced capabilities.
• Build the dashboard and quick actions that role needs for daily work.
• Organize the native admin menu without pretending that visibility grants permission.
• Assign the complete workspace to one or several roles, with optional individual exceptions.
• Verify the menu that was actually rendered in the browser for a selected role, including items hidden later by plugin CSS or JavaScript.

This integrated workspace model reduces the gap between a role configuration, the menu an administrator intended to show, and the navigation the end user actually receives.

Effective menu verification

Third-party plugins do not all register permissions and admin screens in the same way. A screen can declare one capability for its menu and still apply additional checks, conditional registration, AJAX permissions, REST permissions, or plugin-specific rules later.

DevAgent Admin Workspace records both:

• The menu WordPress and active plugins made available before workspace filtering.
• The menu items that were actually present and visible in the role user’s rendered wp-admin navigation after workspace filtering and late plugin CSS or JavaScript changes.

The menu editor reports the result on each card:

• Visible to this role.
• Hidden by workspace.
• Pending verification.
• Configured as visible, but not shown.
• Not available to the selected role.
• Not currently registered.

When the intended configuration and the browser-rendered menu differ, the card explains the registered capability, role context, last verification, parent-menu result, possible causes, and recommended checks. The browser observation is generic and is not tied to a list of supported plugins. Newly detected plugin screens are never enabled automatically.

Main features

• Create, duplicate, publish, deactivate, preview, restore, and safely delete workspaces.
• Create and duplicate custom WordPress roles.
• Configure capabilities through guided questions or an advanced technical view.
• Detect standard capabilities, capabilities stored in registered roles, and capabilities declared by captured admin menu screens.
• Start from editable role and workspace templates for common client and content-management profiles.
• Build accessible, server-rendered dashboards with configurable blocks.
• Add capability-aware quick actions and validated destinations.
• Rename, hide, reorder, group, and review native administration menu items.
• Add validated internal and external navigation links.
• Compare configured menu visibility with the browser-rendered menu observed for each assigned role.
• Keep new plugin screens outside the workspace until an administrator explicitly approves them.
• Assign one published workspace to a role or override it for an individual user.
• Detect users whose multiple roles point to different workspaces.
• Redirect eligible users to a validated workspace start page after login.
• Replace the native Dashboard entry for users who receive a workspace.
• Exclude every user who has the manage_options capability.
• Recover the previous valid configuration for each workspace.
• Disable workspace application through an emergency constant.
• Review local diagnostics and a bounded configuration-change log.

Security model

Navigation and permissions are deliberately separate. Hiding a menu item changes presentation only. It does not remove a capability and it does not block a direct URL when WordPress or the destination plugin still authorizes that user.

Showing a menu item also cannot grant access. The selected role must already have the capability required by WordPress and the destination plugin.

Users with manage_options are permanently excluded from workspace application in this version. Administrators can preview workspaces without impersonating another user or changing their own capabilities.

All configuration-changing actions require the appropriate plugin capability and a valid nonce. Saved URLs, dashboard blocks, quick actions, menu configuration, role changes, and workspace assignments are validated and sanitized.

Privacy

The plugin stores all data locally and does not send telemetry or load remote resources.

Depending on configuration, it may store:

• Workspace configuration and assignments.
• The ID of the user who created a workspace.
• Role-specific menu snapshots in expiring transients.
• The ID of the user who performed a configuration change in a limited local log.

The plugin does not store IP addresses. It registers suggested privacy-policy text and integrates with the WordPress personal-data export and erasure tools. User deletion removes individual assignments and anonymizes retained local references.

Multisite

Each site maintains its own workspaces, assignments, settings, and logs. Network activation initializes existing sites, and newly created sites receive site-local defaults. The plugin does not add network-wide workspace management or synchronization.

No external services

DevAgent Admin Workspace does not contact external APIs, require an external account, download runtime dependencies, load assets from a CDN, or perform license checks.