The Life and Times of Michael Shadle

There's a completely new way now to hide dashboard items, and I finally think I found the easiest way to do it, after having to poke around looking for the right hooks. This basically applies the same set of "screen options" to every user regardless if they've customized it or not. It leaves only the "Right Now" and "Recent Drafts" on the dashboard, but feel free to customize this array by checking the name that you want to hide and adding it to the array.

Also you can easily add more options such as column layout and such by customizing it on a user account, going into the database and looking for the 'metaboxhidden_dashboard' and related keys in the usermeta table and force-applying those (which is essentially what I did here)

Just thought I'd share this little tidbit of information. It can be put in its own plugin or inside of an existing one, as long as the filter gets triggered you're good to go. I've got it working properly in 2.8.6 currently without an issue.

function hide_dashboard_stuff() {
   $hide = array(
      0 => 'dashboard_recent_comments',
      1 => 'dashboard_incoming_links',
      2 => 'dashboard_plugins',
      3 => 'dashboard_quick_press',
      4 => 'dashboard_primary',
      5 => 'dashboard_secondary',
   );
   return $hide;
}

add_filter('get_user_option_metaboxhidden_dashboard', 'hide_dashboard_stuff', 1);