WordPress 2.0/1.5.x Hack: How to trim the fat resource hogging Admin DashBoard
I got tired of the fat, resource-hogging DashBoard shipped with WordPress 1.5. It gets feed from God-knows-how-many WordPress blogs for no good reason and without my (or your) consent.
Update: This also works on WordPress 2.0.
It comes up the first thing when you login to admin. I don't like any of that. This thing downloads even when I am on my home setup running WordPress from localhost!
So despite my reluctance to modify core WordPress code, I just couldn't take it any longer.
So I hacked the code, trimmed it of all fat and made it look lean and mean on an Atkins diet. In other words you have all the cool info about your blogs, as before, without any irrelevant information. As a result it doesn't need to query other blogs (fetch feeds etc) and as such loads much faster.
In the original version some people informed that it takes as much as 75 seconds on slow DNS to load!
Take a look at the screenshot. If you like it, feel free to download. Grab the index.php and drop it in wp-admin directory, replacing the original file. You must make a backup of the original file before that (and everything else under the Sun if you so like).
Drop me a word/pingback/trackback if you find it useful. A linkback would be highly appreciated.
Update: Please download the version 2 of this file here. It contains few time-saving enhancements (without any performance penalties).
Note: If you find this plugin useful, please consider contributing to ensure development of more such plugins and maintenance.
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March 20th, 2005 at 5:19 am
Fantastic, thank you very much!
March 20th, 2005 at 5:55 am
Much better this way, thanx.
March 20th, 2005 at 6:32 am
I just wanted to say thank you for the slimmed down admin page. Much appreciated!
March 20th, 2005 at 6:36 am
[...] s too long. I do have to send a shout out to angsuman for his much slimmed down dashboard hack. It removes all the RS [...]
March 20th, 2005 at 7:58 am
nice modification
i’d be interested to know how you got your nice url’s to work.
ie: http://siteurl/index.php/category/post
March 20th, 2005 at 2:08 pm
@Matteo I have described my permalink structure and also some justifications why I haven’t included date in permalink. Let me know if you find it useful.
March 22nd, 2005 at 4:13 am
[...] 17; Change Filed under: Blogging / Related — Teeters Priss sent me a link to a WordPress hack that chang [...]
March 22nd, 2005 at 3:45 pm
I am PATHETICALLY grateful to you for the “dashboard on a diet”! Thanks. You’re a prince. I’m linking to you….
As to the permalink thing, I can’t even get the .htaccess/modrewrite to work. I have an .htaccess produced by Cpanel which has other domains allowed to access images on various sites - wp never sees it as writeable, even if I set it 777, and I haven’t a clue how to make it behave manually. I really wish I could follow what you’ve done….
March 22nd, 2005 at 6:27 pm
@Vkaryl
Thanks a lot! You made my day
To implement the solution on permalinks you do not need .htaccess/mod_rewrite to work.
Frankly I don’t like them either. They are too arcane in syntax and even the slightest change can easily break the site.
To implement my solution with permalinks all you have to do is login as admin in WordPress, go to Options/Permalink and change the Structure to /index.php/archive/%postname%/ and Category base to /index.php/category
You are done!
Now you get permalinks url like this website for posts and category. No more ugly url’s with query strings. Also such permalinks helps search engines to better place your site wrt. keywords.
Enjoy!
March 23rd, 2005 at 8:31 am
AHHHH!!!! You are a KING! Thank you…. I think there’s something mentioned on the permalinks page similar, but it made no sense to me - but now I see.
Thanks SO much. WordPress has the world’s best community!
March 23rd, 2005 at 9:36 pm
Awesome! dashboard now fires up so faaaast! amazing stuff mate
March 24th, 2005 at 1:44 am
Now this was one of the best things I did for my blog today!
Thank you soooo much.
Aki
March 27th, 2005 at 5:18 am
Hi. Thanks for the hack. I really appreciate your sharing.
There is one problem I believe. I had a password problem and WP issued a new one. The problem? The dashboard diet has reduced the “change password” option all together. I don’t think it’s there anymore. Consequently, it seems I’m now stuck with the standard issue password instead of one of my choice.
Any ideas on how I might rectify this?
Thanks again.
E. Alvin Davis
ScoreMoreClients.com/blog
March 29th, 2005 at 3:38 pm
@E. Alvin Davis Dashboard-on-Diet doesn’t do absolutely anything to the password change screen.
To access it (password change screen) you should go to Users Menu (in admin), click on Your Profile and supply your preferred at the bottom.
Let me reassure you again that Dashboard-On-Diet cannot and does not affect any other screen. It has been thoroughly tested before release.
If you are unable to access the User/Your Profile then it has probably to do with some plugins you have installed or any other changes made.
March 29th, 2005 at 7:38 pm
You are absolutely correct. My mistake. Thanks for pointing this out — and for your great modifications.
March 30th, 2005 at 9:35 pm
Much better, thanks
March 30th, 2005 at 9:36 pm
[...] of the Anti-Apartheid Movement My Wordpress dashboard is on diet This seemed like a good idea to [...]
April 1st, 2005 at 5:54 am
Very nice, thanks. Dashboard is now useful - well, almost
April 2nd, 2005 at 4:50 pm
[...] I hacked the code, trimmed it of all fat and made it look lean and mean on an Atkins diet. More.. [...]
April 9th, 2005 at 3:20 pm
nice work. my dashboard now looks a lot less cluttered.
April 9th, 2005 at 8:20 pm
I Now Have Trimmed the Fat
This is just a cool little hack for WordPress. It slim-ifies your Dashboard to just display stats on your blog and none of that other stuff. You do have to overwrite the code for the index.php file in your admin directory, but that’s all you have to d…
April 12th, 2005 at 1:00 am
[...] luding WealthyBlogger and I always cringe when I see it. Angsuman Chakraborty has created a great little hack, which [...]
April 12th, 2005 at 2:32 am
Ha,
I thought I was the only one who is sick of it. Kudos to you!!
For what it’s worth here is a link to the changes I made too:
Screengrab:
http://www.cafegeek.com/i/temps/cgadmin.gif
Link to index.php(index.txt):
http://www.cafegeek.com/public_html/i/temps/index.txt
April 12th, 2005 at 10:59 am
[...] you scroll all the way down you’ll see a list of draft posts. Jeremy points to the changes Angsuman Chakraborty ma [...]
April 12th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
[...]
« BlogKits Blog Survey
WordPress 1.5 Hack
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April 12th, 2005 at 9:32 pm
Trimming the fat from WordPress
Simple Thoughts: “I got tired of the fat, resource-hogging DashBoard shipped with WordPress 1.5. It gets feed from God-knows-how-many WordPress blogs for no good reason and without my (or your) consent.”
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April 12th, 2005 at 10:48 pm
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April 14th, 2005 at 1:22 am
[...] dollar! Lets all mock CowboyNeal of Slashdot for totally goofing this news posting up. Anyone use WordPress 1.5 and ha [...]
April 14th, 2005 at 1:27 am
[...] dollar! Lets all mock CowboyNeal of Slashdot for totally goofing this news posting up. Anyone use WordPress 1.5 and ha [...]
April 14th, 2005 at 2:08 pm
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April 14th, 2005 at 3:45 pm
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April 16th, 2005 at 3:52 am
[...] ti in blog in varie parti del mondo. Come consigliato da Ugo, si pu scaricare la patch da qui. Il funzionamento abb [...]
April 16th, 2005 at 3:16 pm
I just happened to stumble upon your hack on trimming down the index of the admin page, and I can’t say anything bad about it! =) It really helped me out a lot and now this website of mine loads a lot faster. Thanks!
April 16th, 2005 at 5:48 pm
I tried this, but all I see is the “Latest Activity” box. The rest of the page (apart from the menubar on top) is blank.
Blog stats, drafts and incoming links are not shown.
Any ideas?
April 16th, 2005 at 11:20 pm
@Carlos
1. Are you using WordPress 1.5?
2. Have you replaced the index.php in wp-admin directory with my version?
3. Have you made any further changes to that directory?
If 1 & 2 is true and 3 is false then you should see a screen similar to what is shown in the post (click for larger view).
Let me know.
April 17th, 2005 at 4:47 am
@angsuman:
1. Yes, using 1.5
2. Yes, renamed my version, popped yours in.
3. Nope, no further changes.
Everything to the left of the “Latest Activity” box is missing…
UPDATE… I just went to look at it to send you an image, and it’s there! It works! Must’ve been some database update thing.
Thx.
April 17th, 2005 at 10:29 pm
@Carlos
That looks about right
April 18th, 2005 at 4:24 am
Very nice work, and useful indeed—ultrasonic dashboard now!
Just a sidenote, more of a personal taste matter: Blog Stats + Drafts + Incoming Links being ‘glued’ to the left side of the viewport seems a bit unattractive; I like it more wrapped inside the default white container. But hey: personal taste.
April 21st, 2005 at 3:18 am
[...] ive » WordPress 1.5 Hack: How to trim the fat resource hogging Admin DashBoard Simple Thoughts » [...]
April 22nd, 2005 at 9:01 pm
This is amazing. I am going to fit mine right now and add it to my list of default tweaks and upgrades for installs for third parties. Could this be a new euphemism. *Reduced* means deleted. Great stuff. Thanks.
April 23rd, 2005 at 2:03 pm
[...] mber of post and comments and some other stuff. You can read all about the Dashboard hack her [...]
June 3rd, 2005 at 10:01 am
You have no idea how close I was to giving up before I found your hack…. my dashboard page took about 30 secs to login before, and now I can get it in less than 2 secs!
June 3rd, 2005 at 10:46 am
@Terence
I am happy to know you found it useful!
June 8th, 2005 at 6:49 pm
This is very nice modification. I have done it and the dashboard load very fast now. Thanks…!
June 13th, 2005 at 12:29 am
AWESOME! I love this! Thanks for sharing!
June 13th, 2005 at 3:27 pm
life is much easier now! thank you!
July 19th, 2005 at 6:36 am
While I appreciate the work you put into the hack, wouldn’t an easier workaround — just for avoiding the Dashboard — have been to link directly to the Write page (ala the default admin destination under WP 1.2)? So instead of having your admin bookmark/link point to “blog.com/wordpress/wp-admin”, you point it to “blog.com/wordpress/wp-admin/post.php” (or edit.php, or anything). Just a thought.
July 19th, 2005 at 9:09 am
@CT
The Dashboard does provide overall status of your weblog at a glance. It allows you to view sites linking to you, work on your drafts, moderate comments, write posts, shows latest posts, comments etc. In short functionality that would sorely be missed if we just re-direct to a chosen page.
The only issue was the feeds it was downloading which as you can see from the comments above often takes even a minute or more. Also it makes it harder to use it when you are working on a local installation while being disconnected from the net.
So DashBoard Hack is all the goodies of DashBoard minus the pain-in-the-neck-feeds
In version 2 (link in the post) additional features are provided without the performance penalties.
July 29th, 2005 at 8:14 am
[...] Informações retiradas daqui e daqui. [...]
August 17th, 2005 at 11:36 am
I had the exact same feelings, but I didn’t know about yours so I wrote my own. I added a few different features in case anyone’s interested:
http://dan.hersam.com/archives/2005/08/17/new-wordpress-dashboard
November 7th, 2005 at 11:03 pm
[...] Simple Thought’s How to trim the fat resource hogging Admin DashBoard [...]
December 12th, 2005 at 12:11 am
Thank you so much, I have been trying to figure out how to get that “crap” of the dashboard all day. I don’t understand why they put that there in the first place except to try to steal my traffic.
December 27th, 2005 at 11:52 am
[...] I have uploaded version 2 of the WordPress 1.5 Admin DashBoard Hack which received very good reviews from users across the board. Thanks for all your feedback. [...]
December 27th, 2005 at 12:18 pm
[...] This replacement provides you with a lean and mean WordPress Dashboard, lots of essential goodies without the fluff and super-fast. This is version 3 of the popular WordPress 1.5 Admin DashBoard Hack. [...]
December 27th, 2005 at 1:44 pm
[...] WordPress 1.5 (and 1.5.1) Hack: How to trim the fat resource hogging Admin DashBoard (Version 2) [...]
December 31st, 2005 at 11:16 am
Just installed WP2 and couldn’t figure out WHY they didn’t have a way to disable that lousy dashboard. (it was taking 60-90 seconds to log in!)
Thank you ever so much, now I feel a LOT better working with WP2 but still mad why they didn’t include your hack in WP2.
January 4th, 2006 at 6:50 am
Hi Angsuman
Nice.
(1) I found a version marked Version 2. Is this the latest? I thought I saw reference to a V3 but could nor find that…
(2) Do you have any idea why the ‘Incoming’ RSS call to Technorati sometimes works but most times just comes up empty? The original dashboard seems to get this feed back every time and having looked at the code I see it is identical. But it’s patchy which is curious….
Andy
June 18th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Very nice job there. This dashboard thing was bothering me for a long time.
August 15th, 2006 at 4:52 am
thanks for the hack - I also commented out the fetch_rss call to technorati, because that was adding 30+ seconds to my heavily firewalled intranet blog
April 5th, 2007 at 4:53 am
Its very interesting to see this code been given here. Before reading this I did edit code to show only 1/4th amount of feed, but you have encouraged me to get rid of that and add some useful information for my self and other blogger.
i think i will b glad to network wid u ..