WordPress developers are adding their preferred feeds to WordPress Admin Dashboard (from WordPress 1.5 onwards), which significantly slows up loading the Admin Dashboard.

Additionally few essential information has been removed frfom the official version of admin dashboard and also some information moved to hard-to-get locations in order to accomodate their copious feed data.

This drop-in replacement provides you with a lean and mean WordPress Admin Dashboard, lots of essential goodies without the fluff and super-fast.

This is version 3 of the popular WordPress 1.5 Admin DashBoard Hack.

This version looks nicer and incorporated some ideas from official WordPress 2.0 Admin Dashboard. It has been designed for improved usability. If you liked my previous version, you are going to love it even more.

Download: WordPress Admin Dashboard Replacement

Installation: Rename wp-admin/index.php to wp-admin/index.php.old
Grab the index.php from the downloaded zip file and drop it in your wp-admin directory.

In essence you are replacing the original version of the Admin Dashboard with the new version.

Alternative Installation: You can instead copy the index.php file to wp-content/plugins/ directory. This solution has the advantage that you can upgrade your WordPress installation in future by simply replacing the wp-admin directory, without having to save the index.php (and replacing it later).

The major downside of this approach is that this would not load the new Admin Dashboard automatically after you login. However if you click on the Dashboard link in the menu, the new Dashboard will be loaded correctly. This is a limitation of WordPress architecture.

Note: The alternative installation can be also used with the earlier version of the Dashboard hack.