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Does anyone know how to add an admin menu separator? I found this but it did not help.

Any ideas?

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In case anyone's still searching for the answer to this, this plugin can handle the job. –  user31760 May 2 '13 at 11:43

4 Answers 4

up vote 23 down vote accepted

Here's a quick and dirty way to get what you want.


WordPress stores admin menu sections in a global array called $menu. To add a separator you add an element to the $menu array using an index that is between the indexes of the options that you want to separate.

Using the add_admin_menu_separator() function

So I've written a function to encapsulate the logic for this I called add_admin_menu_separator(). You'll need to pick an array index number that is higher than the option after which you want to add a separator, and then call the function add_admin_menu_separator() passing said index as your parameter.

For example:


The add_admin_menu_separator() function itself

Here's the definition of the function add_admin_menu_separator() which you can copy into your theme's functions.php file. Yes it is arcane but then so is the code that creates and uses the global $menu array. (Plans are to eventually deprecate it, thankfully, but that'll probably be a few years.)

function add_admin_menu_separator($position) {
  global $menu;
  $index = 0;
  foreach($menu as $offset => $section) {
    if (substr($section[2],0,9)=='separator')
    if ($offset>=$position) {
      $menu[$position] = array('','read',"separator{$index}",'','wp-menu-separator');
  ksort( $menu );

Finding the index into $menu that you need

To figure out what index number you need you can do a var_dump() of $GLOBALS['menu'] from within an admin_init hook. Here's a bit of code you can drop into your theme's functions.php file temporarily to see what the values are. This will only work when requesting a URL starting with /wp-admin/ (but be sure to do with with FTP and not the built in theme editor or you'll loose access to your site, at least until you get FTP access to your theme's functions.php file!):

function dump_admin_menu() {
  if (is_admin()) {

See Also:

BTW, you might find these links useful in general for working with admin menus:

Although my admin menu classes don't currently offer an easy way to add separators I think I'll now add that when I have time.

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Thanks Mike, I checked all night studying global var menu, but I didn't managed to add a separator,it is now much clearer to me how menus works in wp. –  user1147 Oct 7 '10 at 16:53
Hi @user1147: Yes, they are very hard to figure out. When I first had to it took me quite a lot of time, and I still struggle with them. Hence why I wrote those functions, so I can do it the easy way from now on! Anyway, glad my answer helped. –  MikeSchinkel Oct 7 '10 at 17:39
@MikeSchinkel This method isn't working for me with Wordpress 3.3.1. –  Jim Geurts Jan 9 '12 at 22:49
@JimGeurts - it's not working for me either :/ –  Evan Mattson Apr 24 '12 at 17:56

Had some issues with separators not being added, it was due to the way wordpress removes duplicate separators. Adding ksort($menu); to the bottom of the function corrected the issue.

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It's easy as:

add_action( 'admin_init', 'add_sep' );
function add_sep() {

    if ( ! is_admin() )
        return false;

    global $menu;
    $sep = $menu[4]; // that's the default separator
    $pos = 6; // change it for the desired position
    $menu = array_merge(
        array_slice( $menu, 0, $pos ),
        array( $sep ),
        array_slice( $menu, $pos + 1, -1)
    $menu[ $pos - 1 ][4] .= ' menu-top-last';
    $menu[ $pos + 1 ][4] .= ' menu-top-first';


Note: The default separator position ($menu[4]) can be different depending of which configuration you (or your plugins) have done before this hook.

Of course, you can also tweak the menu-top-first and menu-top-last classes introspection.

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It's a little hard to determine what you're trying to do, but I think you're looking to add a top-level entry in the WordPress admin menu.

See this documentation in the WordPress Codex.

In short, you're looking for usage of the add_menu_page() function, which takes a number of arguments and displays an additional item in the administrative menu as a sibling of "Dashboard", "Posts", "Media", etc.

Hope I got it right. :-)

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I'm just trying to add an admin menu seprator. Before posting the question I tried to use add_menu_page(). –  user1147 Oct 6 '10 at 20:56
Looks like MikeSchinkel got you pretty well covered. Sorry about the misunderstanding. Good luck! –  dgw Oct 7 '10 at 20:41

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