Wordpress 2.3.1 came with a few good things but the dashboard is still the same bloated monster with the links to the Developer Blog and other news, which slow down loading considerably. Here are a few tips how on how to streamline it a bit and give you only what you need.

Note: it’s always a good idea to make a backup of any files you edit just in case something goes wrong! You should edit php-files in a text editor like Notepad, so you can be sure that no line breaks are added. Make sure you know what you are doing, this requires some digging in Wordpress’ core files! These hacks are tested on Wordpress 2.x versions – use at your own risk.

Remove developer blog and other news links

Remove the following lines from your index.php in the wp-admin folder:

<div id="devnews"></div>
<div id="planetnews"></div>

Remove the “get started” links

Remove the following lines from your index.php in the wp-admin folder:


<p>< ?php _e('Use these links to get started:'); ?></p>
<ul>
<?php if ( current_user_can('edit_posts') ) : ?>
<li><a href="post-new.php"><?php _e('Write a post'); ?></a></li>
<?php endif; ?>
<li><a href="profile.php"><?php _e('Update your profile or change your password'); ?></a></li>
<?php if ( current_user_can('manage_links') ) : ?>
<li><a href="link-add.php"><?php _e('Add a link to your blogroll'); ?></a></li>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php if ( current_user_can('switch_themes') ) : ?>
<li><a href="themes.php"><?php _e('Change your site’s look or theme'); ?></a></li>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>

Shorten blog stats

If you prefer hard numbers over long sentences, find the following line in index.php in the wp-admin folder:

<p><?php printf(__('There are currently %1$s and %2$s, contained within %3$s and %4$s.'), $post_str, $comm_str, $cat_str, $tag_str); ?></p>

Modify to your liking: %1$ stands for the number of posts, %2$ for comments, %3$ for categories and %4$ for tags.

Pimp recent posts list

In order to add the date of the post, follow these two steps. Both changes have to be made in the index.php of your wp-admin folder.

Step 1

Find this:

( $recentposts = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT ID, post_title, FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_date_gmt < '$today' ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 10") ) :

and replace it with this:

( $recentposts = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT ID, post_title, post_date FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_date_gmt < '$today' ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 10") ) :

(If you want to see more than the 10 most recent posts, then change the number after DESC LIMIT in the above code snippet. For example, if you want just 5, type DESC LIMIT 5.)

Step 2

Then find:

the_title();
echo '</a></li>';

And replace it with this:

the_title();
echo '</a>';
echo ' (';
the_time('Y-m-d H:i');
echo ')</li>';

You can format the output of the date (i.e. the_time) with PHP’s date function.

No howdy

If you prefer being greeted by something other than the cheerful howdy in the upper right corner, you will have to edit admin-header.php in your wp-admin folder. Find the following lines:

<div id="user_info"><p><?php printf(__('Howdy, <strong>%s</strong>.'), $user_identity) ?> [<a href="<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/wp-login.php?action=logout" title="<?php _e('Log out of this account') ?>"><?php _e('Sign Out'); ?></a>, <a href="profile.php"><?php _e('My Profile'); ?></a>] </p></div>

Change Howdy to anything you want.

Here’s a screenshot of what your dashboard should look like now:

The slimmer dashboard
The slim version of the dashboard with pimped recent posts list and less clutter