Dashboard

I’ve always thought that the WordPress dashboard could be much better organized. And yes, I’m well aware that I could start submitting track tickets and patches which I’ve done in the past. I love logging in after I first get an admin account on another site because I’m often amused by the sheer absurdity of the amount of navigation items and notifications in the dashboard. I’ve seen so many Admin Bar items that it actually overlaps or wraps. I’ve seen it where the entire dashboard is pushed off the page from upsells, warnings, and notifications. I think folks are just pretty generally overwhelmed by their own notification bubbles, update notices, and whatnot on their phones that they don’t need any more.

Admin Bar

I think I first started customizing the dashboards of the website I built just for the control, but over time it turned into a way to simplify them. There are a couple standard changes I make. The first is stop the ‘Admin Bar’ from displaying for all users. Although I do understand the ease of quickly navigating to an administrative element while I’m on a page, I think it’s just primary distracting. Luckily, it’s just a filter on show_admin_bar1

add_filter( 'show_admin_bar', '__return_false' );

I’m also regularly remove and modify items in the ‘Admin Bar’ that is still available in the back end because I also find them distracting. I think many plugin authors have abused the privilege of being able to add navigation items, dropdown menus, and notifications. This is also easily accomplished hooking into admin_bar_menu2. 

add_action( 'admin_bar_menu', 'dwp23_remove_adminbar', 999 );
function dwp23_remove_adminbar( $wp_admin_bar ) {
  $wp_admin_bar->remove_node( 'wp-logo' );
  $wp_admin_bar->remove_menu( 'edit' );
  $wp_admin_bar->remove_menu( 'new-user' );
  $wp_admin_bar->remove_menu( 'new-post' );
  $wp_admin_bar->remove_menu( 'new-page' );
  $wp_admin_bar->remove_node( 'new-media' );
  $wp_admin_bar->remove_menu( 'edit-profile' );
  $wp_admin_bar->remove_menu( 'comments' );
  $wp_admin_bar->remove_node( 'view-site' );
}
Menu Order

Another thing I regularly do is change the order of the admin menu. Although I certainly understand that WordPress was built on the back of ‘blogging’, I’ve always thought that the better hierarchical structure is to put the pages at the top of the menu. I move pages to the top and then use separators to move the media library into a separate section. I think this makes it more intuitive. I use menu_order3

add_filter( 'custom_menu_order', '__return_true' );
add_filter( 'menu_order', 'dwp23_change_menu_order' );
function dwp23_change_menu_order( $menu_order ) {
  return array(
    'index.php',
    'separator1',
    'edit.php?post_type=page',
    'edit.php',
    'edit-comments.php',
    'separator2',
    'upload.php',
    'separator-last',
    'admin.php?page=theme-settings',
    'themes.php',
    'plugins.php',
    'users.php',
    'tools.php'
  );
}
Footer

I replace the copy on the footer with just the version of WordPress running using update_footer4. 

add_filter ('update_footer', 'dwp23_footer_ver', 999);
function dwp23_footer_ver ($default) {
  return ''. get_bloginfo( 'version' );
}
  1. show_admin_bar – https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/show_admin_bar/
  2. admin_bar_menu – https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/admin_bar_menu/
  3. menu_order – https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/menu_order/
  4. update_footer –https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/update_footer/