Hiding the WordPress-MU Dashboard

This post is intended to accompany Chapter 4 of my book, the WordPress-MU 2.7 Beginner’s Guide.

If you have a WordPress or WordPress-MU powered blog, then you’ve probably noticed the dashboard.  It’s the default ‘landing page’ when you log in to your admin panel.  The dashboard provides some useful information, such as the number of posts you’ve made, the number of comments that have been approved and the number that are awaiting moderation, and even a traffic stats graph.

However, the dashboard can take a long time to load.  This isn’t a problem for everyone – if you’re blessed with a nice fast cable or DSL connection it probably isn’t an issue for you.  But not everyone has a good connection.  I’m making this post via mobile broadband because my usual connection has failed. HSDPA isn’t reliable in this area, so I’m on 3G, and even a page as clean as Google’s is taking an irritating length of time to load.

You can remove some of the clutter from the Dashboard by using the ‘Screen Options’, but you will still land on the Dashboard page when you log in to the admin panel.Personally, I don’t mind the dashboard on my main blogs, but I have some niche blogs on various community sites, and my favourite sites are the ones that blur the line between ‘community’ and ‘blog’.  When you go to manage your blog, you are dumped straight on to the Write Post page – after all, the chances are that’s why you’re visiting the admin panel of your blog.

Sending your users straight to the ‘Write Post’ page will most likely be saving them a click or two.  If it turns out they wanted to do something else, then it hasn’t cost them much time.

If you want to hide the dashboard, then one way to do so is to use the ‘Hide Dashboard‘ Plugin created by Bavotasan.  This plugin will allow you to hide the dashboard for users with certain user levels.

The default version of the plugin hides the dashboard for users who are not admin.  If you would like to hide the dashboard for everyone, you can do that with a simple edit:

Just open the plugin file, and remove the following lines of code:

if (current_user_can(‘level_10’)) {

return;

} else {

Also remove the closing ‘}’ above the ‘add_action’ line near the end of the plugin file.

For your convenience, you can download the edited version of the plugin here.