[wp-hackers] Dashboard Clutter

[Owen Winkler]

Matthew Mullenweg wrote:
> Owen Winkler wrote:
> 
>> And man, there's a lot of self-serving crap in my blog admin now.
> 
> Open to productive suggestions.
> 

Remove everything except for the WP dev feed at the top.  Add a plugin 
hook in the bottom half of the page.

This leaves open a ton of opportunities--  It could replicate the 
current CVS, displaying the planet WordPress feed.  It could handle the 
Feedster feed, too, along with any other service that provides similar 
functionality.  It takes care of the issue of "I want this *other* feed 
on my Dashboard, not *this* one", and potentially gets rid of the bugs 
that were in the feed display in the last CVS I checked out (reloading 
the Dashboard generated errors in those feeds).  This spot could also be 
used for statistics summaries (with cool graphs!) about referrals and 
browsers and such.

It's also a good point that loading it up with feeds or features can 
cause the Dashboard to load slowly.

There are so many things that *could* be on this page that are of use to 
the common user that this should really be a full-on hook location.  For 
WordPress developers, the current feeds might be nice, but I can't 
imagine the average user gives a darn.

Besides that, I don't go to my admin console to get WordPress news, I go 
to the various WordPress news sources, all of which should (if they're 
already not) be mentioned centrally in codex.

That's my conservative take.  If I fully had my way, the whole page 
would be pluggable, including the Latest Activity section.  The WP dev 
feed would be *completely removed* (as I said, I don't go to my own 
admin console to get WP news) but replaced with an output from a 
special, dedicated high-importance feed containing things like "Security 
Patch Released" and "New Version Available".  You don't want items like 
that to be missed in the midst of Craig's illuminating but 
low-s/n-for-most-users interview.

All that said, I'm agreeable to defaults (pre-installed plugins) that do 
exactly what the current CVS output does.

Owen