This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Admin Expert Mode

Description

WordPress has long provided inline documentation throughout the administrative interface that provide explanations for various features and input fields. This includes an explanations of excerpts, trackbacks, custom fields, page parents, etc. These are great for newcomers to WordPress, but for those with sufficient familiarity these bits of text are no longer necessary and merely provide visual noise. This plugin gets rid of those descriptive texts.

The plugin’s behavior is made available as a per-user profile option. Each user who wishes to enable expert mode for themselves must do so individually by going into their profile, checking the field ‘Expert mode’, and then pressing the ‘Update Profile’ button.

Specifically, this plugin removes:

  • Dashboard

    • Description of “Welcome to WordPress!” panel
  • Categories

    • Description of “Category Name”
    • Description of “Category Slug”
    • Description of “Category Parent”
    • Description of “Description”
  • Edit Post

    • Description of “Custom Fields”
    • Description of “Excerpts”
    • Description of “Trackbacks”
  • Edit Page

    • Description of comment status
    • Description of “Custom Fields”
    • Verbose descriptions of “Attributes” (parent, template, and order)
  • Edit Link

    • Description of “Name”
    • Description of “Web Address”
    • Description of “Description”
    • Description of “Target”
    • Description of “Link Relationships (XFN)”
  • Tags

    • Description of “Tag name”
    • Description of “Tag slug”
  • Widgets

    • Text indicating that widgets are added from the listing of widgets on the left.
  • Install Themes

    • Help text for search field
    • Help text for “Feature Filter”
  • Themes – Custom Header

    • Help text simply stating you can upload files from you computer
  • Manage Plugins

    • Description of what plugins are and that they are activated/deactivated on that page
    • Text indicating that broken plugins can be renamed to remove them from being active
    • Description of the “Recently Active Plugins” section
  • Add New Plugins

    • Help text for search field
    • Help text for “Popular Tags”
  • Users – Your Profile

    • Help text for “Biographical Info”
    • Help text for “Sessions”
  • Tools

    • Description paragraphs for “Press This”
  • Tools – Import

    • Description paragraph for “Import”
  • Tools – Export

    • Description paragraphs for “Export”
  • Settings – General

    • Extra help text after input fields for “Tagline”, “Site Address (URL)”, “Email Address”, “Timezone”
  • Settings – Writing

    • Label for “Update Services”
  • Settings – Reading

    • Extra description for “Search engine visibility”
  • Settings – Discussion

    • Description of what avatars are
    • Description of purpose of default avatar
  • Settings – Media

    • Text that explains sizes represent maximum dimensions in pixels of images uploaded to Media Library
  • Settings – Permalinks

    • Help text about “Common Settings”
    • Help text about “Optional”
  • Settings – Privacy

    • Paragraphs of text describing the Privacy Policy page

NOTE: This plugin does NOT remove input field labels or section headers, nor anything containing actual data. In a few cases, descriptive text is left intact when it is of enough importance to warrant retention, or the markup structure does not facilitate easy removal.

Links: Plugin Homepage | Plugin Directory Page | GitHub | Author Homepage

Developer Documentation

Developer documentation can be found in DEVELOPER-DOCS.md. That documentation covers the hooks provided by the plugin.

As an overview, these are the hooks provided by the plugin:

  • c2c_admin_expert_mode : Filter to dynamically determine whether the admin expert mode should be active.
  • c2c_admin_expert_mode_default : Filter to customize whether admin expert mode should be active for users by default or not.

Screenshots

  • A screenshot of some of the panels of the 'Edit Post' admin page after this plugin is activated.
  • A screenshot of the same panels of the 'Edit Post' admin page as they appear in a standard WP 3.3 installation. See the difference?
  • A screenshot of the plugin's profile checkbox on the user Profile page.
  • A screenshot of the form on the 'Categories' admin page after this plugin is activated.
  • A screenshot of the form on the 'Categories' admin page as they appear in a standard WP 3.3 installation. See the difference?

Installation

  1. Install via the built-in WordPress plugin installer. Or install the plugin code inside the plugins directory for your site (typically /wp-content/plugins/).
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ admin menu in WordPress
  3. Each user who wishes to enable expert mode for themselves must do so individually by going into their profile, checking the checkbox ‘Expert mode’, and then pressing the ‘Update Profile’ button.

FAQ

Can I view an admin page with admin expert mode turned off without turning the feature off for my account or disabling the plugin entirely?

Yes. Use the ‘disable-admin-expert-mode’ query parameter with a value of ‘1’ to disable admin expert mode for the loaded page. This would yield a URL, for example, of https://example.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?disable-admin-expert-mode=1. If the URL already has query parameters specified (you’ll see a “?” in the URL), then you have to add the new query parameter as an additional one joined with “&”, e.g. https://example.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?post_type=page&disable-admin-expert-mode=1.

Does this plugin include unit tests?

Yes.

Reviews

April 15, 2021
Excellent code as always from Scott Reilly. This has saved me so much time trying to trim down the Admin Interface. Thank you 🙂
Read all 1 review

Contributors & Developers

“Admin Expert Mode” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“Admin Expert Mode” has been translated into 1 locale. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Admin Expert Mode” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

2.9 (2021-11-16)

Highlights:

This minor release adds DEVELOPER-DOCS.md, notes compatibility through WP 5.8+, reorganizes unit tests, and minor tweaks.

Details:

  • New: Add DEVELOPER-DOCS.md and move hooks documentation into it
  • Change: Add newlines after output block tags and remove newline after label tag
  • Change: Add translator comments to explain placeholders
  • Change: Use stricter equality check in a conditional statement
  • Change: Tweak inline function documentation (typo, verb tenses, bullet list syntax)
  • Change: Tweak installation instruction
  • Change: Note compatibility through WP 5.8+
  • Change: Change a tag in readme.txt header
  • Unit tests:
    • Change: Use stricter regex in a couple tests
    • Change: Restructure unit test file structure
      • Change: Move tests/test-* into tests/phpunit/tests/
      • Change: Move tests/bootstrap.php to tests/phpunit/
      • Change: Move bin/ into phpunit/
    • Change: In bootstrap, store path to plugin file constant so its value can be used within that file and in test file
    • Change: In bootstrap, add backcompat for PHPUnit pre-v6.0
    • Change: Remove ‘test-‘ prefix from unit test files
    • Change: Rename phpunit.xml to phpunit.xml.dist per best practices
  • New: Add a few more possible TODO items

2.8 (2021-03-24)

Highlights:

This release is a recommended minor update that hides text in the welcome panel on the dashboard page, hides text on the “Settings – Writing” and “Settings – Reading” pages, and notes compatibility through WP 5.7+.

Details:

  • New: Hide the description of the dashboard’s welcome panel
  • New: Hide the label for the “Update Services” on the “Settings – Writing” page
  • New: Hide the extra description for the “Search engine visibility” on the “Settings – Reading” page
  • Fix: Fix typo in plugin description
  • Change: Note compatibility through WP 5.7+
  • Change: Update copyright date (2021)

2.7 (2020-06-14)

Highlights:

This release is a recommended minor update that updates hiding of text on “Privacy Settings” page, hides text on “Media Settings” page, hides text relating to avatars on “Discussion Setting” page, adds a TODO.md file, updates a few URLs to be HTTPS, expands unit testing, and notes compatibility through WP 5.4+.

Details:

  • New: Hide the descriptions of what avatars and default avatars are on the “Discussion Settings” page
  • New: Hide the intro paragraph for the “Media Settings” page
  • New: Add TODO.md and move existing TODO list from top of main plugin file into it
  • Fix: Re-hide descriptive paragraphs for “Privacy Settings” page
  • Change: Note compatibility through WP 5.4+
  • Change: Update links to coffee2code.com to be HTTPS
  • Unit tests:
    • Change: Enhance test_default_hooks() to support testing for direct function callbacks rather than just method callbacks
    • Change: Remove unnecessary unregistering of hooks
    • Change: Use HTTPS for link to WP SVN repository in bin script for configuring unit tests (and delete commented-out code)