Selfish Fresh Start

This plugin strips out the dashboard widgets, metaboxes, header tags and default settings that most WordPress sites never use. It fixes curly quotes and other mangled characters pasted in from Word, checks for and removes Hello Dolly, hides update notices from users who cannot act on them, stops your site pinging itself, and locks down the built-in file editors.

There is nothing to configure. Activate it and it works. It is deliberately generalized so it is safe to drop onto any WordPress site as a clean starting point, and it helps keep clients out of the plugin and theme file editors.

Current Operations

• Removed: clean up unneeded header tags including:
  • rsd links
  • wordpress generator
  • shortlink in head and the shortlink HTTP header
• Removed: admin dashboard widgets:
  • core: quick draft / your recent drafts
  • core: wordpress events and news
  • core: the welcome panel
  • plugin: yoast seo posts overview
  • plugin: the events calendar news
  • plugin: all in one seo news
• Removed: post metabox’s
  • trackbacks
• Removed: page metabox’s
  • comments box
  • discussion box
• Removed: appearance menu theme editor
• Removed: plugins editor menu
• Removed: plugins list edit links
• Removed: jquery migrate on the frontend (wp-admin keeps it)
• Removed: more jump link to #anchor
• Removed: update notifications for non-admin users
• Removed: potential for self ping backs
• Removed: checks for and nukes Hello Dolly plugin (sorry @photomatt)
• Fixed: curly quotes, en/em dashes, ellipses and other mangled characters on save
• Off: turn off plugin/theme editor
• Off: turn off global trackback/pingback setting

Additional Functionality

• Emojis scripts and support removal? I almost included it in this plugin but just use this plugin: Disable Emojis
• Want to remove the Tools Menu? There’s a plugin for that: Remove Tools Menu
• Want the post/page slug visible in the admin list? Admin Slug Column
• Want the posts list to default to Published instead of All? Filter Admin Published Default

Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue: GitHub Issues
* Built in Chandler AZ, Updated in San Francisco, CA. I always used a lot of these functions on every site to help clean up the admin stuff and do some basic settings and based on some twitter replies others wanted this too as a public plugin. So… here we go. Bugs and ideas go here: GitHub Issues