As developers, most of us know how to tailor the front end of WordPress to our clients’ or users’ hearts desires. The real WordPress ninja’s know how to refine the part most visitors never see – the backend – for the individual client or project. Inspired partly by one of my more popular Smashing Magazine articles, this session – a WordCamp Chicago debut – offers even more tips for customizing WordPress admin.

After a quick overview, we’ll dive right into the default theme’s functions.php code, where we’ll review specific API hooks, techniques, and tricks for customizing the WordPress admin to reflect your brand or simply reduce the noise. No forking of core code and no plug-ins involved.

Are you a consulting agency that wants to emphasize your brand? Learn how to replace the WordPress logo in the header and login screen, change the credits / thank you notes in the footer, and replace the WordPress news feeds in the dashboard with your own agency’s news feed.

Does your client get easily confused? Add additional contextual help inside the “help” tab based on the admin page. Remove unnecessary default sidebar widgets. Strip down the post and page editing screen widgets (like the custom field editor) based on the user role. Customize the styling of the WYSIWYG editor to better reflect the styling of posts and pages on the front end. Remove unneeded WYSIWYG buttons. Add some common buttons back.

Wish “Posts” were called “Articles” in the admin menu? Learn how to override a few translation strings without creating an entire translations file.

Note that for time and focus reasons, we won’t be covering adding new content functionality to the site admin (custom post types, taxonomies, custom meta boxes). Combine this session with one of the other sessions covering new content types / content meta features and you’ll be building awesome WordPress sites tailored to individual clients’ administrative needs in no time!

Questions about this session? Is there an admin customization tip you want to see covered? You can reach me on Twitter: @jakemgold

Want to help WordCamp Chicago but cannot afford full sponsorship?

Pick your price and donate your chosen amount. All donations will be put towards the costs for running the event including (but not limited to) - venue rental, A/V equipment, power, t-shirts, badges and printing costs, catering, etc. All persons who donate will receive a text link on our sponsors page and a mention at the event. Help if you can - no amount is too small to help us put on a fantastic event for you WordPress fans!