My First WordPress Plugin

Since I’ve been spending so much time working with this great tool called WordPress lately, I decided that I would try and take the first steps towards learning how to build useful plugins for it, since I’ve mastered the whole template design aspect of it now.

The result? I’ve created my first WordPress Plugin – Disable WordPress Dashboard Widgets! It’s available for download here or on the resources page of this site. It’s basically a 1.0 release (1.5, had some minor fixes to implement), and I’m still very rough around the edges with the whole Subversion aspect of plugin management, but it’s a start, and if the traction is there then I’ll definitely keep at it and improve it as time goes on!

So, What Does It Do?

Well, with any default WordPress installation, you end up with a whole bunch of somewhat useful and somewhat useless widgets on the main Dashboard page. If you understand PHP and want to do some hacking with your theme or global functions file, these can be disabled, but if you aren’t so code savvy, this is going to be a tough task for you! There’s no easy way to simply hide these widgets – you can close them, as WordPress calls it, but they remain on the Dashboard page and take up space. If you run a WP E-Commerce site, or Analytics-driven, or social-driven, etc blog or WordPress site, all these extra widgets clutter your main page, and really only detract from what the Dashboard is for – easy information at a glance. So, my first WordPress plugin allows non-power users to easily and quickly hide these widgets from the WordPress Dashboard!

This is a 1.0 release and is very rough around the edges (using 1’s and 0’s to control on and off), but as I said, it’s a work in progress, and my first attempt. And even for a rough release, it’s still functional, which is all that really matters!

So if anyone has a WordPress website/blog, please download and install the plugin and let me know what you think.