Plugin / 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:

• 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 – 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

Hooks

The plugin is further customizable via two filters. Code using these filters should ideally be put into a mu-plugin or site-specific plugin (which is beyond the scope of this readme to explain). Less ideally, you could put them in your active theme’s functions.php file.

c2c_admin_expert_mode (filter)

The ‘c2c_admin_expert_mode’ filter allows you to dynamically determine whether the admin expert mode should be active.

Arguments:

• $is_active (bool): Boolean indicating if admin expert mode is currently active
• $user_login (string): Login of the current user

Example:

<?php
// Never let user 'bob' activate admin expert mode
function aem_never_let_bob_activate( $is_active, $user_login ) {
    if ( 'bob' == $user_login )
        return false;
    return $is_active; // Otherwise, preserve activation status for user
}
add_filter( 'c2c_admin_expert_mode', 'aem_never_let_bob_activate', 10, 2 );?>

c2c_admin_expert_mode_default (filter)

The ‘c2c_admin_expert_mode_default’ filter allows you to specify whether admin expert mode should be active for users by default or not. This filter only applies to users who visit the admin for the first time after the plugin is activated. Once a user visits the admin, their setting gets set to the default state and will no longer be affected by this filter. If you wish to affect the setting for existing users, use the ‘c2c_admin_expert_mode’ filter instead.

Arguments:

• $is_active (bool): Boolean indicating if admin expert mode is active by default (default is false)

Example:

<?php // Enable admin expert mode for all users by default
add_filter( 'c2c_admin_expert_mode_default', '__return_true' );
?>