When you log in to a WordPress site, you will see boxes full of information. These are called “Dashboard Widgets”.
Typical dashboard widgets include “Welcome to WordPress!”, “Quick Draft” and “At a Glance”. Additionally, when you add plugins, they will also add extra dashboard widgets.
We received an interesting question this week from a PublishPress user. One of our customers wanted to remove elements from the “Screen Options” dropdown panel in WordPress.
The “Screen Options” tab is available in most areas of the WordPress admin area. This image below shows an example from the “Pages” screen.
One thing we often hear from new WordPress users is that the interface is noisy. Especially once you have a few plugins installed, it's easy for the admin area to become overwhelmed with notifications, messages, links, alerts, and widgets.
We're on a mission to solve that with PublishPress Capabilities. We want to bring simplicity back to the WordPress admin.
PublishPress Capabilities 2.3 is available now, and it has a new screen called “Admin Features” which help you clean up the admin area.
In this first release, “Admin Features” allows you to control access to two key features:
This image below shows you where those two features are in the WordPress admin area:
When you log in to a WordPress site, you will see boxes full of information. These are called “Dashboard Widgets”.
You will probably see a “Welcome to WordPress!” widget with lots of useful links. There's also a “WordPress Events and News” widget with official updates. There's an “At a Glance” widget so you can quickly see key statistics for your site.
Those are only some of the default widgets. And when you add plugins, they will also add extra widgets. In the image below, you can see a widget called “Easy Digital Downloads Sales” which comes from a plugin.
WordPress sites display an admin toolbar for all logged-in users. This is visible on the frontend of your site and also in the WordPress admin area.
This toolbar contains shortcuts to key features in WordPress. A user in the Subscriber role will only see a few features. A user in the Administrator role may see a very busy toolbar, particularly on a site with many plugins. This image below shows my toolbar here at PublishPress.com:
A WordPress website always starts by looking very clean. But after you choose a theme and install a lot of plugins, the user interface quickly becomes very crowded.
In other guides, we've shown you how to hide WordPress admin menus, hide the admin toolbar, and hide dashboard widgets. In this tutorial, we'll explain how to hide the “metaboxes” that appear below your WordPress posts and in the sidebar, when you're editing a post.
In the image below, you can see some typical metaboxes from Yoast SEO, the PublishPress plugin, TaxoPress, and others.
PublishPress provides 3 dashboard widgets: Unpublished Content, Notepad, and Posts I'm following. These widgets appear on the main Dashboard screen in your WordPress admin area.
If you don't need these widgets, follow our guide to disabling dashboard widgets in WordPress.
The Unpublished Content widget gives an overview of the content that is in each custom status. Currently, this widget does only show posts, not other post types.
If you click on any of the links in this widget, you'll be taken to the main Posts page, and show only post with that status. Here is an example using the Draft status:
The Notepad widget is very simple. It's a text box where you can store notes for yourself:
The Posts's I'm Following widget shows any posts that you have followed, inside PublishPress. You can follow posts via the Calendar screen or the Content Overview screen.
You can disable any or all of these widgets via the “General” tab of the PublishPress settings:
