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Stephanie Leary

Writer, WordPress consultant, recent MLIS grad

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WordPress Hidden Gem: screen option defaults filter

June 3, 2016 Stephanie Leary 3 Comments

I love the fact that a lot of the meta boxes on the WordPress Edit screens are hidden by default. Did you know that it’s really easy to specify which boxes should be hidden? This is great if you’re building sites for clients with lots of plugins that add meta boxes, but you want new users’ administrative experience to be as simplified as possible.

https://gist.github.com/sillybean/c37e7be3e97ab7a8eeea70398c1b93a8

The names in this array match the IDs of the meta boxes you want to hide. To find the ID, just inspect your screen.

Note that this filter affects only the screen options for new users. Anyone with an existing user account already has screen options set, and won’t receive the new default settings.

WordPress admin UX, screen options

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Comments

  1. Ross Wintle says

    June 21, 2016 at 6:54 am

    Nice snippet. I also found a way to put a default ordering on the meta boxes, which was crucial for a site I made for a publisher that had a lot of meta boxes and a specific workflow for working through them: https://oikos.digital/2015/07/tech-notes-default-post-meta-box-order/

    Reply
  2. Vova says

    October 25, 2016 at 9:22 am

    Super, Thank You!
    Long hours of searching ended successfully!

    Reply
  3. Henning says

    September 29, 2017 at 9:35 am

    Awesome!! That really is a gem :)

    Reply

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I’m a front end developer at Equinox OLI, working on open source library software. I was previously a freelance WordPress developer in higher education. You can get in touch here or on LinkedIn.

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