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:
Back in June, we released “Editor Features” in the PublishPress Capabilities plugin. This allowed you to hide almost any feature on the post editing screen.
Why do I say “almost”? Because the first release of Editor Features could not hide metaboxes.
I'm happy to say that you can now use PublishPress Capabilities to hide metaboxes. This means that when users are writing a post, you can hide ANYTHING that you don't want them to see.
Why would you want to hide features from your users? Some people do this so that the post editing screen is cleaner and less confusing. Other people do this for security and to prevent users from changing some key settings.
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.
One of our most popular recent posts on this blog explained how to rearrange metaboxes in the Gutenberg editor. This post is useful because the system for moving metaboxes has some confusing points. Yes, you can move some metaboxes up and down, but the default boxes can not be moved. The image below highlights the difference between the default boxes and those added by plugins.
