bug: bubble notice deleted

The plugin should not remove the bubble unless the menu title has been edited. Has the title of the “Users” menu been changed?

You can see if the title field is still using the default setting by looking at the text color. If it’s the default, the text color will be light grey. If it’s a custom setting, the text will be black and there will be a pencil icon to the right of the field. You can reset a field to the default value by clicking that pencil icon.

Further testing I did, which is easily recreated:

1. Perform virgin WP install (6.0.1), php 7.4
2. Add 2 plugins to this WP: Ultimate Member and Admin Menu Editor.
3. Create a new user & set to Pending Review status so that UM will add the bubble notice.
4. Activate Admin Menu Editor. Bubble remains.
5. Open Admin Menu Editor UI and hide any Users submenu item. Bubble vanishes!
6. Unhide submenu item. Bubble still gone.
7. Use “Load default menu” and save. Bubble still gone.
8. Clear all caches, cookies, the works. Bubble still gone.
9. Deactivate Admin Menu Editor. Bubble returns!
10. Reactivate Admin Menu Editor. Bubble vanishes.
11. Deactivate and DELETE Admin Menu Editor. Install and activate Admin Menu Editor. Bubble remains.
12. Hide Users parent item, then unhide. Bubble still gone.
13. Visit site, clear caches, return to admin. Bubble still gone.

As you can see, the problem arises when a menu item containing a bubble notice is tampered with via Admin Menu Editor, and it stays a problem until Admin Menu Editor is deactived (deleted and reinstalled, if user wants to change menu items other than those with bubbles while retaining the bubbles).
This behavior occurs even when the submenu item being hidden is not the top/first item.

Your plugin is doing things with the database that isn’t playing nice with other plugins and the offender(s) is/are getting removed upon deleting your plugin.

It could be a UM-exclusive thing, but I suspect this is a universal incompatibility. I have yet to verify that, though, since UM is the only plugin I use at the moment that adds a bubble notice.

Ah, so it’s a conflict with Ultimate Member. I took a brief look at the source code of Ultimate Member 2.4.2 (free version) and I think I see the problem: Ultimate Member uses the admin_head hook to add the bubble. By the time this hook runs, Admin Menu Editor has already applied the custom admin menu configuration, so any further changes don’t have any effect and the bubble doesn’t show up.

It looks like this could be easily fixed in Ultimate Member by making it use the admin_menu hook for editing the admin menu, not the admin_head hook.

On the other hand, I don’t think it would be easy to fix this in Admin Menu Editor. It is technically possible to move the menu customization process from admin_menu to admin_head, which would allow AME to catch menu changes that other plugins make in the admin_head hook. However, this could decrease overall site security because admin page permissions depend (in part) on admin menu permissions, and those permissions need to be checked before admin_head.

In case you’re curious about why your testing produced the results it did, here are some clarifications:

• The reason why everything works fine before you make changes in Admin Menu Editor (your step #5) is that AME doesn’t modify the admin menu if there is no saved menu configuration.
• The bubble shows up again when you deactivate AME (step #9) because the admin menu is a dynamically generated thing, not something that WordPress stores in the database. This means that the AME has to be active to customize the admin menu; it can’t just edit a database record.
• When you uninstall AME (step #11), it also deletes plugin settings, so you’re back to the “no saved configuration” state.