The Life and Times of Michael Shadle

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A No-hack Dashboard Removal Plugin
Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 11:47 pm

I don't know why this wasn't discovered (or a better action put in by the WP folks to begin with that could be disabled) but I was able to find a way to disable the feeds from loading on the WordPress admin dashboard without any need for customized index.php files (which would need to be updated/re-uploaded every time WP is updated.)

I'm not sure why this isn't just a stock WP configuration option. It seems enough people have looked for ways around it. My biggest issue was that it requires connectivity directly with each RSS feed, which does not work very well behind our firewall at work. I'll be damned if I hack up some proxy-capable solution too for the feeds that we don't really even look at.

I knew that there had to be a way to mess with the actions being called to disable them from loading the Javascript, or make the fetch_rss() calls return nothing, or make the index-extras.php script return nothing... the easiest and apparently effective way was making a simple action trigger and finding the right order in which it was effective.

In the end, this is all the code that was required:

function remove_dashboard_feeds() {
      remove_action('admin_head', 'index_js');
}

add_action('admin_head', 'remove_dashboard_feeds', 1);

To make a long story short, I give you the "Remove Dashboard Feeds" plugin, located here. Just download, remove the .txt extension, throw it in the plugin directory and activate it. Simple enough. Works on WP 2.2, and probably 2.1. Not sure about earlier versions, but nobody should be running those anyway (keep up with the times as much as you can! Stay secure and optimized!)

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31 Responses to "A No-hack Dashboard Removal Plugin"

  1. On May 29th, 2007 at 11:58 am, Tayler says:

    I successfully installed them on 4 different copies of WP 2.2. And get this, it works in the mu-plugins folder of WPMU. Thanks, Mike!

  2. On May 30th, 2007 at 12:34 am, wordpress?? - ???5.29 at wordpress??? says:

    [...] [????] [????] [...]

  3. On June 16th, 2007 at 8:42 am, Dan says:

    Had some trouble with this in 2.1... Guess I'll have to get off my lazy a** and upgrade. Thx for the plugin.

  4. On June 19th, 2007 at 9:57 pm, mike says:

    Thanks for the feedback. Depending on your WP setup the upgrade should be quite seamless. I did it on a production server without testing it first... all my old custom plugins worked fine and this one does too (although I made this one post upgrade.)

  5. On June 23rd, 2007 at 10:40 am, BUGabundo says:

    It works just fine on MU
    thanks

  6. On July 7th, 2007 at 1:08 am, WP Plugins DB » Plugin Details » Remove Dashboard Feeds says:

    [...] Visit [...]

  7. On August 6th, 2007 at 10:38 pm, Max says:

    Tks a lot for this. I think this is a feature that have to be installed on Wordpress options.

  8. On August 8th, 2007 at 6:06 am, mizu says:

    "Error 404 - Not Found
    You have landed on an invalid URL."

    source not found...:(

  9. On August 8th, 2007 at 11:07 am, mike says:

    doh. fixed! changing webservers can be annoying :)

  10. On August 9th, 2007 at 1:29 am, mizu says:

    thanks! it just works, and so simple, I like it! big thx for it.

  11. On August 22nd, 2007 at 4:13 pm, Philip says:

    I'm not getting this. I go to your download link but just get code. Is there a plug in to download and upload to my hosting environment? What am I missing?
    By the way, I think this is a great plugin idea.

  12. On August 22nd, 2007 at 4:54 pm, mike says:

    plugins are just php code.

    this can be put it its own .php file, or put into an existing .php file in the plugins directory. it requires no special configuration or activation (unless you make its own file, then you have to click activate)

    you can download the .txt, rename it to .php, upload it to plugins dir, and activate it.

    or if you have shell access, to go the plugins directory and do this:

    wget http://michaelshadle.com/files/wordpress/remove-dashboard-feeds.txt
    mv remove-dashboard-feeds.txt remove-dashboard-feeds.php

    then go into wordpress admin and activate it.

  13. On August 29th, 2007 at 6:06 pm, Eliminare i Feed dalla Dashboard (Bacheca) di WordPress - WP Plugin » Italia SW says:

    [...] i Feed dalla Bacheca di Wordpress è Semplicissimo, grazie a Michael Shadle è disponibile un plugin (qualche riga di codice) che svolge il “lavoro sporco”. Il [...]

  14. On September 11th, 2007 at 7:53 am, Plugins: Remove those Dashboard Feeds in Wordpress! | InvestorBlogger says:

    [...] That was until I found a plugin by Michael Shadle that does the job nicely… A No-hack Dashboard Removal Plugin [...]

  15. On October 23rd, 2007 at 2:53 pm, David M. Besonen says:

    does this work with WP 2.3.x?

  16. On October 23rd, 2007 at 3:30 pm, mike says:

    I have not tested it yet in WP 2.3, although I am running it with an upgraded-to-WP2.3-install at work and it appears to be functioning properly. I haven't actually tried it officially though :) It appears my multiple attempts to subscribe to WP release notifications is still not working, so I am not being notified when a new version of WP comes out. I missed the 2.3 launch by a couple weeks! If it works for anyone else please post. I will report my findings when I upgrade this WP install at least.

  17. On October 23rd, 2007 at 10:17 pm, mike says:

    Update: disabled/enabled it on WP 2.3 and it works fine. When disabled, the feeds show up again as expected.

  18. On December 7th, 2007 at 6:37 am, Steve Blamey says:

    You could also add this code to the functions.php of your chosen theme. I am doing that on 2.3.x and it work great. Thanks for the code.

  19. On December 7th, 2007 at 1:43 pm, mike says:

    Yeah that's why I pasted the code by itself too. It can go anywhere.

  20. On December 11th, 2007 at 9:41 pm, WordPress Admin Themes and Tools - Blog Tipz | Make Money Online says:

    [...] and displays once you sign in. Remove the WordPress Dashboard If you don't like all the feeds, this no-hack dashboard plugin removes them and this plugin code completely removes the dashboard page, so you can always go to [...]

  21. On December 15th, 2007 at 1:17 am, houserocker says:

    thanks for this great and very easy to use plugin!!

  22. On January 13th, 2008 at 9:39 am, pete says:

    cheers :)

  23. On February 14th, 2008 at 1:03 pm, Bret says:

    Thanks. Simply fantastic. Now my WP dashboard is much cleaner and easier to read. Thanks again

  24. On April 28th, 2008 at 3:31 am, Sven says:

    Hi, I tried to download your plugin but the server answers with:
    "
    Fatal error: Call to undefined function add_action() in /mnt/nfs/mike/web/michaelshadle.com/files/wordpress/remove-dashboard-feeds.php.txt on line 17"
    I'd be happy to get your plugin. So maybe if there is some time...
    Thank you

  25. On April 28th, 2008 at 10:55 am, mike says:

    Thanks for pointing that out. When I switched to nginx I forgot how I had it setup. The link is fixed now, it will not execute it as PHP, it is purely .txt now.

  26. On May 8th, 2008 at 10:25 am, David says:

    Just upgraded from 2.3.1 to 2.5.1 and this doesn't seem to work any longer. Any chance you might have time to tweak it? Thanks!

  27. On May 8th, 2008 at 10:32 am, mike says:

    I was hoping that by 2.5 part of their dashboard enhancements would render this useless, because they'd offer the feeds/etc. as an option. Apparently not!

    I'll make sure it works when I get around to upgrading to 2.5.1 myself, and I'll post an update.

  28. On July 24th, 2008 at 3:00 am, online shopping says:

    It should definitely be a stock Wordpress option. Not sure why it isn't. I guess they may be thinking of just making it well known in a later version or something. Interesting enough, that's for sure. I'm going to be experimenting with this and seeing if this might solve another problem I'm experiencing at the moment.

  29. On October 2nd, 2008 at 12:02 pm, Perry says:

    Hi There,

    It only works partially for me.
    I use WP 2.6 and i still have those boxes in my dashboard, the are empty, except from that one line: Loading…

  30. On October 2nd, 2008 at 12:25 pm, mike says:

    Yeah. It doesn't work in 2.6. I should make an update.

    However I thought I saw they were planning on shipping with an option to turn it off. But I don't remember actually seeing that in my installation. I don't think it made the cut.

    From what I gleaned from the WP 2.7 wireframes/etc. the feeds won't be there anymore (or they won't be activated by default or on the dashboard at least)

  31. On October 6th, 2008 at 2:33 pm, Feed Statistics Wordpress Plugin (WP Feed Plugin) Updated | www.TheWordpressPlugin.com says:

    [...] A No-hack Dashboard Removal Plugin - The Life and Times of Michael On August 29th, 2007 at 6:06 pm, Eliminare i Feed dalla Dashboard (Bacheca) di WordPress - WP Plugin Italia SW says: [ ] i Feed dalla Bacheca di Wordpress [...]

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