DevDome Admin Cleaner: Admin Bar, Admin Menu & Dashboard Cleanup

DevDome Admin Cleaner helps you simplify the WordPress backend by hiding notices, dashboard widgets and selected toolbar items. Review captured notices in the Notice Inbox and use Client Mode to simplify the admin dashboard for selected roles. Cleanup changes what users see without changing their permissions.

Hide admin notices and review them later

The Notice Inbox lets you manage on-screen notifications without losing track of their sources.

• Hide plugin notices for yourself or all administrators.
• Snooze selected notices for 1 or 7 days.
• Review notice sources, classifications, first-seen dates and mute status.
• Enable an optional toolbar bell that links to the inbox. Snooze notices for 1 or 7 days from the Notice Inbox.

Notice hiding includes update, error and security notices. Recognised operational notices carry a Critical badge in the inbox. Restore a notice to show it again for everyone.

Notice hiding applies only to users who can access Admin Cleaner, normally administrators. Hiding update notices does not disable updates or fix the issues they report.

Dashboard customization

Choose which dashboard widgets remain visible in your admin panel. You can remove dashboard widgets from view individually or apply the broad cleanup.

• Hide the Welcome panel, Activity, Quick Draft, At a Glance, Events & News and Site Health.
• Hide dashboard widgets added by plugins and themes.
• Hide admin footer text, the version number and notice rows beneath plugins on the Plugins screen.

Check the workspace clutter estimate and its inverse, the Cleanliness indicator, to review your workspace preferences. These are not measures of site health or security. Hiding Site Health or Updates does not improve them.

Admin bar and toolbar cleanup

Hide selected admin bar items: the WordPress logo, Comments, New, Updates and Customize. You can also hide extra top-level items added by plugins or themes.

This admin customization provides basic cleanup of logos and footer text. The toolbar itself remains available.

Apply cleanup in wp admin

Open DevDome Tools > Admin Cleaner. Choose individual settings and press Save Settings, or press Clean My Admin for a broad cleanup.

Clean My Admin applies these changes:

• Hides dashboard widgets and supported toolbar items.
• Hides footer text, the version number and plugin list notice rows.
• Hides all notices already captured in the inbox for all administrators.
• Enables Auto-hide new notices, including supported notices added after page load.

Undo last change restores the previous settings once. Notice mutes are separate: use Restore or Clear all mutes to show hidden notices again. Turn off Auto-hide new notices if you want future notices to remain visible.

Admin Cleaner works on its own and also shows its summary in the shared DevDome Tools dashboard.

Client Mode and admin menu visibility

Use Client Mode to hide menu items for roles registered on your site, including custom roles. You can hide menus for Plugins, Tools, Settings, the editors and Updates, plus the footer version number.

For a client dashboard with fewer distractions, choose the entries clients need to see during handover. These custom admin settings simplify the existing workspace. For client handover, use Client Mode to hide selected menu entries for chosen roles without changing permissions.

Client Mode never changes roles or capabilities. With the corresponding options enabled, the theme editor, plugin editor and Updates screens redirect to the dashboard. Other direct URLs still follow the user’s existing permissions.

Users with manage_options, the Admin Cleaner capability or network management privileges are exempt.

What cleanup changes and what it preserves

Cleanup never deletes posts, pages, media, plugins or themes. It never changes user permissions or replaces access control.

Removing inbox records, deleting all notice data and retention housekeeping can permanently delete the plugin’s stored notice records and mutes. Uninstalling removes its settings and notice data.

Local data and privacy

Settings, notice records and mutes stay in your site’s options table. Notice excerpts are redacted before storage and limited to 160 characters.

• Redaction removes email addresses, tokens, keys, nonces, URL query strings and filesystem paths.
• Raw notice HTML is never stored.
• Retention targets 200 records. Unresolved protected notices are kept even when this exceeds the limit, with a storage warning.
• Expired snoozes and orphaned mutes are cleaned automatically.
• Delete all notice data removes stored notices and mutes without resetting settings.

Admin Cleaner sets no cookies and sends no visitor data off-site. Its cleanup features run locally and need no external service. Shared dashboard requests, optional account connections and user-submitted error reports are described in External services.

AI agents and abilities

On WordPress 6.9 or newer, 14 abilities let authorised AI agents inspect settings and notices, apply cleanup, undo settings, manage notices and run housekeeping. MCP clients can use them through the WordPress MCP Adapter. Abilities include snoozing for 1 to 90 days.

Every ability checks the plugin capability. Actions affecting all administrators or deleting records require explicit confirmation where specified. Agent output excludes email addresses and server paths. Older versions register no abilities.

External services

Error reports (devdome.com), only when you press “Report this error” on an error message. The plugin sends the error text, the plugin, bundled library, WordPress and PHP versions, whether the site is a multisite, the site locale, the screen you were on, its own state (counts and flags, never a notice text), your site address, the generated site ID, your DevDome account ID if the site is connected, and your admin e-mail (so support can reply) to https://devdome.com/api/plugin/error-report. Nothing is sent unless you press the button. Service provider: DevDome. Terms: https://devdome.com/terms-of-service Privacy policy: https://devdome.com/privacy-policy

Plugin catalog (devdome.com). The DevDome Dashboard inside wp-admin fetches the list of DevDome plugins (names, descriptions, logos, links) from https://devdome.com/wp-plugins/catalog.json at most once every 12 hours (one hour after a failed fetch), so the list stays current. Only the bundled core version is sent in the request; no site or visitor data. Service provider: DevDome. Terms: https://devdome.com/terms-of-service Privacy policy: https://devdome.com/privacy-policy

Admin Cleaner’s own features (the notice inbox, dashboard, admin-bar and footer cleanup, and Client Mode) run entirely on your own server and make no network requests.

The plugin bundles the shared DevDome suite library that powers the DevDome Tools dashboard. What that library may contact depends on the edition you are running; on the WordPress.org edition nothing is contacted before you act; the self-hosted edition also checks for updates as described below.

WordPress.org edition

The WordPress.org package carries a build marker that keeps the library’s bot-detection feed download permanently off and contains no self-hosted updater; updates come only from WordPress.org. Besides the two requests above (error reports you send, the plugin catalog), the only other request the shared library can make is the optional account connection below.

Connecting a DevDome account (optional, both editions)

The DevDome Tools dashboard offers connecting a free DevDome account (used by other DevDome plugins for optional email alerts; Admin Cleaner’s own features stay local; the shared library performs only the checks described here). Nothing is sent until you press the Connect button. If you do connect: the shared library sends your site address, a generated site ID and a generated secret site token to analytics.devdome.com/api/plugin/connect/start and /api/plugin/connect/claim to link this site to your account; afterwards it confirms the connection with api.devdome.com/plugin/account (site address plus the site token in a request header) normally at most once every fifteen minutes while a DevDome screen is open (sooner right after connecting, and after ten minutes when a check failed), and tells api.devdome.com/plugin/disconnect when you disconnect. When you connect from the DevDome Tools dashboard, whose Connect card states this before you press the button, those account checks also carry the slug and version of each active DevDome plugin on the site plus the bundled DevDome library, WordPress and PHP versions, so your DevDome account can show your sites and their DevDome plugins for support and update notices. Nothing about other plugins, users, email addresses, content or visitors is included. Sites connected before this was introduced, and sites connected from a button that does not show that text, do not send the list. Disconnecting stops the checks and the plugin list. Terms: https://devdome.com/terms-of-service. Privacy: https://devdome.com/privacy-policy

Self-hosted edition only

• https://api.devdome.com/plugin-updates/devdome-admin-cleaner.json: the self-hosted update manifest, checked from wp-admin and cron (never on front-end requests), cached six hours, ten-second timeout. The request sends no site data; it is a plain download. The updater validates the manifest (trusted host, HTTPS, matching plugin, sane version) and, when the manifest publishes a checksum, verifies the downloaded package against it before installation; on any failure the installed version keeps working.
• https://api.devdome.com/bot-protection/*: the shared once-daily bot-detection reference lists (verified-bot user-agent patterns and datacenter/bad-IP networks) used by other DevDome plugins. A one-way download; no data about your site or visitors is sent.

Privacy

• Your Admin Cleaner data stays local. Settings, notice records and mutes are stored only in your own WordPress options table and are removed on uninstall.
• Stored notice excerpts are redacted first. Email addresses, tokens, keys, nonces, URL query strings and filesystem paths are stripped before anything is saved, notice excerpts are capped at 160 characters, and raw notice HTML is never stored.
• Retention is bounded. At most 200 notice records are kept; unresolved protected notices are never discarded to satisfy the cap (you are warned instead). Expired snoozes and orphaned mutes are cleaned automatically.
• You can delete everything. “Delete all notice data” removes every stored record and mute on demand; your settings stay as they are.
• No cookies are set by this plugin and no visitor data leaves your site.

AI agents and MCP

On WordPress 6.9 and newer, Admin Cleaner registers 14 WordPress Abilities covering the whole plugin, so an AI agent or MCP client (through the official WordPress MCP Adapter) can do what the screen does and a little more: get-status, get-settings, get-notices (filter by status, type or a search word, sort, page), get-notice (one in full), clean-my-admin, undo-last-change, update-settings, notice-action (snooze1, snooze7, hide, hide_admins, restore), snooze-notices (1 to 90 days), delete-notices, clear-all-mutes, delete-notice-data, refresh-summary and run-housekeeping. Every ability requires the plugin capability (manage_options by default); the actions that hide for every administrator, the ones that delete stored records (delete-notices, delete-notice-data, run-housekeeping), clear-all-mutes and an undo that would turn Auto-hide on require confirm: true. Agent output never carries e-mail addresses or server paths. On older WordPress versions nothing is registered.