How to Remove Posts, Dashboard Widgets and other Elements of the WordPress Administrative Backend

April 3, 2012 7:52am

I use WordPress as a Content Management System, ie. CMS, for nearly every one of my clients. The control and flexibility it provides means they save cash updating their sites, and I save time (and therefore, more cash for the client) building the websites thanks to built in features like search and the flexibility of plugins. That said, WordPress comes packed with a lot of features that most of my clients don’t use, or some just don’t need on a per client basis.

This little tutorial will walk you through a few easy steps on how to hide or disable various features in the backend.

Everything we’ll discuss here today goes into your functions.php file.

Removing Dashboard Widgets

Most of my clients could care less about updates from the WordPress developer’s blog. Many of my sites are too complicated to utilize features like Quick Press (as I often have lots of custom fields that are required to get a post looking and functioning correctly). Removing Dashboard widgets is a pretty easy task. Just add the following code to your functions.php file, somewhere between the tags. I’ve made some notes in the code below, just delete any lines for widgets that you wan’t to keep.

function remove_dashboard_widgets() {

	global $wp_meta_boxes;

	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_quick_press']); // Removes QuickPress

	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_incoming_links']); // Incoming Links

	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_right_now']); // Removes Right Now

	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_plugins']); // Removes Plugins

	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_recent_drafts']); // Removes Recent Drafts

	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_recent_comments']); // Removes Recent Comments

	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_primary']); // Removes the WordPress Developer Blog

	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_secondary']); // Removes the WordPress Blog Updates

}

add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'remove_dashboard_widgets' );

Hiding Navigation Elements

Not all of my clients want to manage a blog, or therefore comments, and even fewer want to manage a list of links outside of the Page functionality. Here I’ll show you how to hide any primary sidebar navigation item. Note that this does not actually remove the functionality, but simply hides the navigation element via CSS.

add_action( 'admin_head', 'cn_admin_customize' );

function cn_admin_customize() { ?>

<style type="text/css" media="screen">

#welcome-panel, #menu-posts, #menu-media, #menu-links, #menu-pages, #menu-comments, #menu-appearance, #menu-plugins, #menu-users, #menu-tools, #menu-settings {display:none;}

</style>

<?php }

What that does is injects some CSS into your admin pages’ header, and tells it to hide various elements. The #welcome-panel can be excluded, that hides the initial Welcome message that is shown on the Dashboard when a user logs in. If you don’t hide this, well, it has links pointing to many of the other areas of the site we’re trying to hide, making it kind of pointless to hide them.

You can extend this practice to just about anything else you can get the ID or narrow down the element enough via CSS to hide.

Enjoy!

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Discussion

Auriel Bartley 7 Apr 2013

Hi, I came across this page from Google search. I’m trying to keep the side widgets on the home page only and not on all the posts. I’ve managed to remove them from my other pages by selecting full width but can’t find an option for this on my posts.

Hope you can help as I’ve been told there are too many links and banners on my posts which are distracting and messy.

Regards
Auriel

Reply
nathan 8 Apr 2013

Auriel,

It’s pretty difficult for me to tell you exactly how to do this without knowing which theme you’re using but I can help get you started.

Firstly, while Pages have Page Templates which can affect the layout of the Page itself on the front end, Posts do not have this. Therefore, you need to edit your Theme’s templates…which keep in mind will mean you’ll need to re-implement the changes every time you update the theme (or if you want to get really adventurous, learn about Child Themes.

Hop into your site’s Administrative area and go to Appearances > Editor. In the list of files on the right, look for sidebar.php, click that and it’s contents will fill the editor window.

Copy all of the code in that editor window and save it in a Notepad or Textedit file so you have a backup if things go wrong!

Next, find some code that looks like this (from the TwentyTen theme):

if ( ! dynamic_sidebar( 'primary-widget-area' ) ) : ?>

And change that too:

if ( ! dynamic_sidebar( 'primary-widget-area' ) && !is_single()) : ?>

That should turn off the widgets for that specific area and only on single blog post pages.

Again, your mileage will vary depending on your theme and there may be multiple calls to dynamic_sidebar() in your theme’s templates, so explore, experiment, and always back things up before saving anything!

Reply
Ignazio 18 Nov 2013

Hey Nathan!
Thanks for the post, how can I remove elements for specific users though…
I kind of which there was an handy plugin for that!

Let me know any suggestions you might have!
Thanks

Reply
nathan 19 Nov 2013

Ignazio, you’ll want to use get_current_user_id(). Something like this:

add_action( 'admin_head', 'cn_admin_customize' ); function cn_admin_customize() { $user_id = get_current_user_id(); if ( $user_id == 2 ) { ?> <style type="text/css" media="screen"> #welcome-panel, #menu-posts, #menu-media, #menu-links, #menu-pages, #menu-comments, #menu-appearance, #menu-plugins, #menu-users, #menu-tools, #menu-settings {display:none;} </style> <?php } }

That says, “If the user with an ID of 2 is logged in, echo the following CSS which will hide those items from that particular user.”

You could go from there getting wild with different CSS for different users. You can get a User’s ID by editing their account in WordPress and looking in the address bar for the user_id=## value.

Reply
Gary B 16 Apr 2014

On my wp-admin (2013 theme) page for Sidebars at Appearance –> Widgets, there are two Sidebars on the right-hand panel, one for a Main
Widget Area and the second for a Secondary Widget Area. How do I get rid of these?
Thanks.

Reply
nathan 16 Apr 2014

Gary,

What you’re talking about is a bit different than what I’m addressing in this post, but if you wanted them gone altogether, open up functions.php and search for register_sidebar_widget, then delete that entirely.

That’s the easy way, but you’ll have to do that any time you update the theme. The “right” way to do it would be to create a child theme and then remove them, but that’s more involved than this comment is going to get into.

Or you may just be able to remove all of the stuff in those widget boxes and they might not show up on the front end, I’m not too sure how TwentyThirteen works in that respect as I mostly work with custom themes.

Reply
Andrea 31 Mar 2018

but the code also hide the classes? I tried but it does not work

Reply
1. nathan 12 Apr 2018
  
  This post is about six years old, Andrea, so I’m not certain if those are all still valid.
  
  Reply