Dashboard Widget Manager

Discontinuation Notice:

WordPress 2.7 features a fully widgetized dashboard and allows you to hide widgets you don’t want to see. As a result, this plugin is now deprecated. I will however probably be releasing other plugins in the future to enhance the 2.7 dashboard (even more widgets, etc.).

Description:

WordPress 2.5 introduces a widgetized dashboard, but unfortunately no manager for it to rearrange and remove widgets. This plugin fills that need by creating a new admin page very similiar to the new sidebar widget manager.

Additionally, it makes it so that widget options as well as the order is stored on a per-user basis. This is great for those multi-user blogs.

Screenshots:

Known Bugs:

Most widgets will show up with a double title on this plugin’s management page. This is a WordPress bug, one I can’t work around. Don’t worry though, it doesn’t affect your actual dashboard.

Download:

116 thoughts on “Dashboard Widget Manager”

  1. A nit-pick: With this plugin, the “right now” section includes the theme’s widgets and the dashboard’s widgets in the total widget count. e.g., “You are using Colorful theme with 13 widgets.” Since that section refers specifically to the theme, it should not count the Dashboard widgets. In my example, it should display the count as 8.
    Other than that, a nice plugin. Thanks for writing it!

  4. This seems like an ideal plug-in at the perfect time, but how does one add in new widgets of their own to the dashboard. WordPress says its easy, but so far, we have not been lucky enough to stumble upon the relevant documentation, and it seemed only obvious that this plug-in would allow it.

    Although we seem to be able to edit the existing dashboard by removing or moving widgets around, it does not seem to allow you to add new widgets or actually edit the existing widgets (only remove or move them).

    Will these features be added soon, could you point us in the right direction if we were wanting to add in the features ourselves…?

  10. This plugin could not have come at a better time! I think it is just about the most fantastic plugin I have seen in recent time. Faboulus work!

    I have one issue with it though: Why cant I remove all the widgets? I seems to revert back to standard 5 widgets then.

  11. camu on March 30th, 2008 at 7:58 AM wrote:

    Hello there, is there also a way to list recent drafts in the dashboard?

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dashboard-draft-posts/

    Kimmono on April 1st, 2008 at 2:37 PM wrote:

    I have one issue with it though: Why cant I remove all the widgets? I seems to revert back to standard 5 widgets then.

    Grr, I thought I fixed that bug. Oh actually, I think I know where that issue is coming from. Thanks for the report. 🙂

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  16. great plugin, but i’ve still got a prob:

    i am using the widget manager in conjunction with berri technorati reactions on dashboard. yesterday everything worked fine – technorati incoming links were shown and my dashboard looked the way i want it to.
    today the technorati widget is still there but empty (no links shown) and in the dashboard managers backend the is this failure for this widget:

    %BEG_OF_TITLE%Technorati Reactions%END_OF_TITLE%

    both plugins are working fine, when i turn the other one off. any ideas what the problem could be?

    cheers
    martin

  18. nice plugin, at the right time

    but we’ve different roles on our blog
    a administrator, an editor, a contributor and so on

    I can install the plugin without problems
    I can remove widgets from admin
    works fine

    unfortunately if I login with another user with a different role than administrator, the settings are partially gone, not all widgets present but also not all widgets away which I removed from admin

    and very much needed, a plugin that shows correct right now stats PER USER (and not a grand total) or a plugin that allows to remove the right now panel

  20. Hi!

    Please

    I have a question about plugin DASHBOARD-WIDGET-MANAGER :

    How to operate the settings for all users?

    Please!!

    Thank you very much

    Regards

  22. Store dashboard widgets options on a per-user basis. Now you and all of your fellow administrators can have separated widget options. Non-administrators will see the configuration of the last person to update.
    -> that seems rather confusing, because the initial configuration can be destroyed and the main admin does not know how does look like the dashboard to other registered users. More generally, I would like a display per role, rather than per user.

    Your program is great but I appreciate the alternative approach used by Widgetized Admin Dashboard. It uses the standard design/widget page, and “just” add another entry (wordpress dashboard) to menu that normally only display “sidebar”.
    I am not doing speed dating -)), but you could look at the comment I have done to the other plugin. A merging of the two will be great.
    http://pressography.com/plugins/widgetized-admin-dashboard/

    Regards

  23. Hi! using your plugin since a couple of day.
    I was surprised not to be able to edit the control panel of my dashboard widget.

    I saw that if you skip the css line of your plugin (you know the admin_head function), the controls can be displayed.
    But … updates doesn’t work. Are you working on that ?

    Thanks.

  24. arena on April 9th, 2008 at 4:25 PM wrote:

    Hi! using your plugin since a couple of day.
    I was surprised not to be able to edit the control panel of my dashboard widget.

    I saw that if you skip the css line of your plugin (you know the admin_head function), the controls can be displayed.
    But … updates doesn’t work. Are you working on that ?

    Thanks.

    No, that’s the whole reason the CSS is there to hide it. I didn’t see the need to go to the ton of trouble to make it work as you can edit the widgets on your dashboard.

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  27. Viper007Bond on April 7th, 2008 at 9:22 PM wrote:

    I have yet to fix it so that my plugin’s page shows up for non-admins, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to make it so that non-admins can edit the settings of the actual widgets (like change the RSS feeds and such) as that’s controlled by WordPress.

    i think it would be enough if admin can set a standard dashboard on a per role basis. or, at least, a dashboard for all roles different from admin 🙂

  28. I have yet to fix it so that my plugin’s page shows up for non-admins, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to make it so that non-admins can edit the settings of the actual widgets (like change the RSS feeds and such) as that’s controlled by WordPress.

    i think it would be enough if admin can set a standard dashboard on a per role basis. or, at least, a dashboard for all roles different from admin 🙂

    I am developing a blog with multiple users, and have installed this plugin along with the Pending Review, Drafts, and Scheduled Posts plugins (all are definitely cool, thank you!). I can see the “dashboard” and “widgets” on the admin dash, but my editors cannot when logged in under their user roles — and they need to see this information at a glance on login.

    Further, I have absolutely no desire to allow these folks access to WP’s settings and file editing capabilities, as they might bork the whole shebang (it has already happened).

    The Role Manager plugin allows me to set the option for users to edit the dashboard, but they still can’t see it. How can I allow Editors, Authors, and Contributors to edit this page as they see fit — for themselves?

    Thanks in advance,

    WP 2.5

  29. Will K: the next version of my plugin supports widget re-arranging for all users and possibly (still working out the kinks) widget settings editing for all users too.

  30. Viper:

    Thanks for the quick reply! I appreciate it greatly. Do you have a timeline for the next version release, by any chance? This plugin is indispensible for a site with 16 writers, authors and editors…

  32. Great plugin! I don’t care much about letting them edit the dashboard settings per role. But IT DOES GREATLY MATTER that all roles see the changes that I have made to the dashboard.

  33. Will K on April 16th, 2008 at 5:55 AM wrote:

    Do you have a timeline for the next version release, by any chance?

    No more than a week or two. Still coding it.

    Bryan on April 16th, 2008 at 8:07 PM wrote:

    Great plugin! I don’t care much about letting them edit the dashboard settings per role. But IT DOES GREATLY MATTER that all roles see the changes that I have made to the dashboard.

    Oh, hmm. That’s actually “fixed” in the next version.

    I guess I’ll add an option to chose who’s modified dashboard should be shown to people who haven’t customized their own dashboard.

  34. Viper007Bond on April 16th, 2008 at 9:43 PM wrote:

    No more than a week or two. Still coding it.

    Viper, you rock!

    Brian has a point, and I guess I kind of *ass|u|me’d* this would be a one-and-the-same issue, as I’m not letting the authors install their own plugins, just letting them arrange the order that is best for them… that, and to a couple of the writers the WP News column is important — the rest couldn’t care less and don’t want to see it (so they could remove it), and so on…

  35. Will K on April 17th, 2008 at 6:12 AM wrote:

    just letting them arrange the order that is best for them

    That’s exactly what this plugin lets them do — pick what they like best.

    The default though currently in the next version for people who haven’t edited it falls back to as if this plugin wasn’t installed — i.e. the default dashboard usually.

    However, I’m gonna make it so you can pick which user’s dashboard should be shown to people who haven’t customized their own dashboard.

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  39. Dieter on April 21st, 2008 at 11:37 PM wrote:

    Great plugin, I would really like to use it to clean up my admin panel but I found a BUG:

    The bug is with their plugin, not mine. They are calling fetch_rss() and if their widget(s) are moved via my plugin to be before any of the standard RSS widgets, that function won’t be defined at the time their widget runs.

    My next version of this plugin will be loading the file itself, so it should work even with buggy widgets like that one.

  41. Viper

    The Facebook dashboard widget (mentioned above) was something I threw together last weekend, and it was pretty much the first plugin I’ve publically released – hence the buggyness 😉

    Any tips on fixing the plugin to be compatible with your dashboard widget manager? I’ve only just stumbled across this little gem of yours and I think I’ll be having a look at installing it tonight, so I’ll be working to update my own plugin to work with it in the next day or so..

  42. Chris on April 22nd, 2008 at 2:41 AM wrote:

    The Facebook dashboard widget (mentioned above) was something I threw together last weekend, and it was pretty much the first plugin I’ve publically released – hence the buggyness 😉

    Hehe, no worries. In your defense, it works fine without my plugin. 🙂

    Chris on April 22nd, 2008 at 2:41 AM wrote:

    Any tips on fixing the plugin to be compatible with your dashboard widget manager?

    Just add this before you use fetch_rss():

    require_once( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php' );

    That’ll load up the RSS functions if they haven’t already been loaded by another widget. 🙂

  43. Cheers for the heads up Viper, I’ll take a look tonight.

    I’d do it now, but my company blanket blocks any web pages with “facebook” in the URL – I probably should have thought of that when I was naming it… 🙂

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  48. This might be what I’m looking for, originally found the plugin below but you can’t customise it on a role basis without some apparently complex coding.

    http://anthologyoi.com/wordpress/plugins/wordpress-dashboard-editor.html

    Can you confirm that this new version will all the admin to decide what the author/contributor sees. I run a blog which I don’t want authors etc to access, see or view anything that is not related to their posts. So they can’t see wordpress news, incoming links, they can’t view the total number of posts etc. Also don’t want to give them the ability to edit their dashboard and decide to see stuff.

    In an ideal world they would log in and see an intro message which you could customise on a user basis if you have a note to leave them and they can write posts, save drafts and respond to comments on their posts.

    Is this possible?

  49. saff on April 24th, 2008 at 5:52 AM wrote:

    Can you confirm that this new version will all the admin to decide what the author/contributor sees.

    The new version gives you the option to allow anyone to customize their dashboard if you want (currently only admins can). The new version will also allow you to a pick a “default” for anyone who doesn’t have a customized dashboard of their own (you pick a user and it’ll show them that user’s dashboard as the default).

    If you disable editing of the dashboard for non-admins, you basically restrict them to the default dashboard that you’ve picked. It will not however, at least at this point, allow you to control the default dashboard on a per-role or per-user basis.

  50. Aw, man… I had this whole soliloquy written out about how one guy wanted to limit what his users see, and I wanted to let them customize it… how you’d have all of this development fork stuff going on… which way to go…

    …and your quick response just took the wind out of my sails! Hah! I love it!

    It looks like you’re just about there on both extremes. I can’t wait to see the next release.

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