Cleaning Up the WordPress Post Screen

This article will teach you how to remove portions of the Write Post SubPanel in WordPress 2.0.4.

Please read on only if you are comfortable with editting WordPress core files.

If you still would like to hide portions on the WordPress Post screen then I suggest getting hold of Mark’s Clutter Free WordPress plugin. However, this will only hide the portions and not prevent their loading. With v0.3, you can now remove the preview and the upload pages, so you don’t need to modify any core files.

Remember to BACKUP all the files that you will be editting. I will not be liable in case your site is messed up!

I suggest using Notepad++ for editting the files.

Inline Image Uploading

This is used to upload images. I use IImage Browser along with my Open Picture Window Plugin for adding images to my posts and hence the inline uploading is useless to me. If you don’t have a similar arrangement to upload images to your blog, then skip this step.

1. Open the file edit-form-advanced.php in wp-admin

2. Find echo '<iframe id="uploading" border="0" src="' . $uploading_iframe_src . '">' . __('This feature requires iframe support.') . '</iframe>';

3. Change it to echo '<!-- <iframe id="uploading" border="0" src="' . $uploading_iframe_src . '">' . __('This feature requires iframe support.') . ' -->';

The above images will give you an idea of what is to be done. Notice the commented out area in green in the image on the right.
You can also remove the inline upload from the Write Page subpanel by editting edit-page-form.php

Optional Excerpt

This summary will be used to describe your post in RSS feeds and is typically used when displaying search results or your posts. If you leave this blank, WP automatically uses the first few characters of your post as the excerpt.

1. Open the file edit-form-advanced.php in wp-admin

2. Find <fieldset id="postexcerpt" class="dbx-box"></fieldset>

3. Add the start of an HTML Comment, i.e. <-- before the fieldset tag and close the HTML Comment after the corresponding closing fieldset tag.

The above images will give you an idea of what is to be done. The code after editting is in the image on the right.

Trackbacks & Custom Fields

I do not recommend hiding both these fields. Hence, I haven’t written a detailed guide to this. However, if you want to remove this, then comment out their corresponding fieldset tags.
The images below should be sufficient.

The Post Preview

24FightingChickens explains how to do this.

Images below should guide you.

Other Sections

I would like to get into detailed explanations of removing the other sections, however since most of these are similar I will cover them in short.
You will need to edit edit-form-advanced.php.

• To remove Discussion, comment out fieldset with id="commentstatusdiv"
• To remove Password-Protect Post, comment out fieldset with id="passworddiv"
• To remove Post slug, comment out fieldset with id="slugdiv"
• To remove Categories, comment out fieldset with id="categorydiv"
• To remove Post Status and Post Timestamp, comment out the respective fieldsets containing them. They don’t have individual ids. I believe this is fixed in 2.0.5
• To remove the Post Author, you need to comment out the fieldset with id="authordiv"

Known Bug

I’m not sure if this is repeatable, but I noticed that WordPress started giving me an error while editting posts. Not much of an error, but it kept prompting with questions like “Are you sure you want to do this” and “Are you sure you want to edit this post”.
I’m not aware of a solution. I solved it by reuploading all the files in the 2.0.4 package and running upgrade.php