Finding your way around

Pet Central’s own navigation runs down the left-hand side, as a panel of sections you open and close. It is always there while you are inside the plugin, whatever the collapse setting on the rest of WordPress says — that setting is remembered for your other screens and left alone.

Sections open one press at a time

Each section — Bookings, Clients & Pets, Finance, and the rest — folds open to show its pages. The section holding the page you are on opens itself, so you can always see where you are. The first item inside any section is Overview: the section’s own front page, which used to be reachable only by pressing the section heading and was easy to miss.

“(List)” means the raw list

Seven items are marked (List) — your bookings, your services, clients, pets, invoices, payments and expenses, the first four under whatever your trade calls them. Those open the plain WordPress list of records: everything, in a sortable, searchable table you can filter and bulk-edit. They are the back door for finding one record among thousands, or for tidying up in bulk. The purpose-built screens above them — the calendar, the client screens, the invoicing run — are where the day-to-day work is done.

WordPress’s own menu is folded underneath

Below Pet Central’s panel is a single row marked WordPress. Press it and the whole ordinary WordPress menu unfolds — Posts, Media, Plugins, Settings, and every other plugin you have installed. Nothing has been removed and nothing is hidden from you; it is closed to begin with so that two menus are not competing for your attention while you are working in Pet Central.

Inside it, the items behave the same way as Pet Central’s sections: passing over a row highlights it and nothing else moves, and the pages underneath open in place when you press. WordPress would normally throw a small panel out over the page as soon as the pointer crossed a row, which is a lot of movement on a screen you are only passing through.

If there is more than fits

The panel scrolls by itself when both menus together are taller than your screen, so the bottom of it can always be reached.

Example

Looking for an invoice from March for a client whose name you half remember, you open Finance, press Invoices (List), and search the table — then go back to the invoicing run to raise this week’s.

FAQ

What is the difference between “Invoices” and “Invoices (List)”?
The first is Pet Central’s own screen, built for the job — raising, sending and chasing. The (List) one is the plain WordPress table of every invoice record, which is better for searching, sorting and bulk actions. Both show the same invoices.

Where has the menu across the top gone?
It is the panel down the left now. It holds the same sections and the same pages — there is one navigation, not two.

I cannot reach the bottom of the menu.
The panel scrolls on its own. If it will not, your browser may be holding an old copy of the stylesheet — reload the page with Ctrl+F5 (Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac).

Is the Overview ever locked?
No. A section’s Overview is its front door — a page of links saying what is inside — and it is free on every plan. Pages inside it may carry a padlock, and opening one tells you which plan includes it. Reports and Marketing used to point their Overview straight at a paid page, which put a padlock on the way in and listed that page twice; both have their own Overview now.

Why do the WordPress items no longer pop out a panel when I hover them?
Because Pet Central’s do not, and two menus in one column behaving differently is harder to use than either. Press a WordPress row and its pages open underneath it, exactly as a Pet Central section does; press the chevron on the right if you want the pages without leaving the screen you are on. Every page is still there — nothing has been taken out of that menu.

Can I collapse the menu to icons like WordPress does?
Not on Pet Central’s screens. The plugin’s navigation lives in that panel, and collapsed to 36px of icons there is no way around it. Your collapse preference is untouched everywhere else in WordPress.

Why does my menu say Dogs and someone else’s says Pets?
The wording follows your trade. A groomer has Appointments, Treatments and Dogs; a walker has Walks, Walk types and Dogs; a sitter has Visits, Visit types and Animals; a trainer has Sessions, Session types and Dogs. Run more than one service and everything goes back to the plain words, because one trade’s vocabulary should not be imposed on another’s screens. They are the same screens whatever they are called.