Adding (blog-specific) links to “My Sites” admin page

Question

The My Sites admin page only has links to the sites’ dashboards and production pages which is of limited value. I am trying to figure out a way to add a more useful links to them like New Post, Drafts, and Comments in order to make the page a practical central administration location (that way, I don’t have to use a page that I cobbled together with IFrames several years ago for this).

Obviously I will have to write a plugin, but I’m having trouble finding good examples of modifying the admin pages, especially in this specific manner (adding blog-specific information to multiple items on an admin page). The closest thing I could find was right here; a question about sorting the items, but the accepted solution simply adds a filter to sort the list of blogs and doesn’t help with this.

The file /wp-admin/my-sites.php creates the blog list on the My Sites page with the following code:

foreach ( $row as $user_blog ) {
    $s = $i == 3 ? '' : 'border-right: 1px solid #ccc;';
    echo "<td valign='top' style='$s'>";
    echo "<h3>{$user_blog->blogname}</h3>";

    /* CREATE LINKS HERE: */
    echo "<p>" . apply_filters( 'myblogs_blog_actions', "<a href='" . esc_url( get_home_url( $user_blog->userblog_id ) ). "'>" . __( 'Visit' ) . "</a> | <a href='" . esc_url( get_admin_url( $user_blog->userblog_id ) ) . "'>" . __( 'Dashboard' ) . "</a>", $user_blog ) . "</p>";

    echo apply_filters( 'myblogs_options', '', $user_blog );
    echo "</td>";
    $i++;
}

There are two problems:

1. I can find no information on chaining a modification to the myblogs_blog_actions filter. The best I can accomplish is to append some text to the HTML containing the links, but without information on the specific blog being processed, I cannot provide blog-specific links, at least not without first parsing the links already provided which seems like the wrong way to be doing this.

2. I cannot find any information on a function that returns the URL of the comments, post-new, or drafts (or other admin) pages. Obviously I could append a hard-coded string to the blog root URL (e.g., post-new.php) but that seems kludgy; surely there is a proper built-in way to get them.

I made a test plugin which can modify the links, but it has no way of accessing the blog id to provide blog-specific links because no additional parameters are provided. I suppose I could parse the existing links in the string passed to the filter, but that is as inelegant as it gets:

add_filter('myblogs_blog_actions', 'my_sites_links');
function my_sites_links($links, $a, $b, $c) {
return                 "\n"
  . var_dump($links) . "\n"
  . var_dump($a)     . "\n"
  . var_dump($b)     . "\n"
  . var_dump($c)     . "\n";

Does anyone have any suggestions on accomplishing this?

Answer 1

function my_sites_links($links, $a, $b, $c) {
global $user_blog; 
$user_blog->userblog_id;
}