The Administration Menu module revolutionized my Drupal experience. At CRL, we wanted to use it not just for our administrators but for our regular users. We needed to customize the menus produced by the module to make it easy for content editors to use. We could have modified the menu, or we could have followed the suggestions in the README and copied the CSS into our theme. However, I wanted to avoid having multiple pieces of code to maintain and keep my modifications in one place. So, I tried implementing a module that used admin_menu’s hooks to add and manipulate menu items. It’s kind of hacky, but a good start for others who want to accomplish similar things. Read more about the module.