A short while ago I bumped into a discussion on Twitter (again) about admin notices in WordPress, how they are misused or wrongly used by different plugins, how annoying they are sometimes (most of the time), and why there is nothing done about it in WordPress core.
In 2023 my friend @neverything even ran a test where he installed and activated the 108 most popular plugins and showed the results. The article and the video are definitely worth checking out.
Anyway, I sympathize with the users being annoyed by all the wanted and unwanted, useful and useless admin notices in WordPress, which come in all shapes and colors. So I thought I would try my hand at this and create a plugin that would clean up all the clutter and create one central place for all the notices. Yeah, I know, there are already plugins for this, but I had a different approach in mind and wanted to see if I could pull it off. 🙂
As it turns out I could, so I created Dashboard Notices, a plugin for decluttering the WordPress admin dashboard.
The current version does a great job of hiding properly added WordPress notices. I asked @neverything to install it on his test site with 108 plugins and see how it works out. While it didn’t catch all the notices – since there are some that are improperly added – it did catch 32 of them. Check out the results in this set of before-after screenshots (props to @neverything). The red line marks the start of the actual content.
I encourage you to take it for a test drive. If you have any feedback, I’d be happy to hear it.
And what about the improperly added notices? That’s a more difficult nut to crack, but not impossible. Maybe in an upcoming version… 🙂
For now, head over to the Dashboard Notices page for the details and to grab a copy.
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