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:
Admin toolbar
Dashboard widgets
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.
Many WordPress themes rely on Excerpts, but they can be a mystery to many users.
In this post, I'll explain what an Excerpt is, how you create them, where they appear, and how you can get more control over how they're used on your site.