Dobby, the Friendly Admin Elf

WordPress has these things called admin notices. In principle, they are a great means to inform users about certain incidents. When overused, however, they are nothing but a huge annoyance. Unfortunately, a lot of plugins do overuse them. So I wrote a small plugin myself that takes care of all your (unwanted) admin notices. And this post is about just that.

Everyday Life in the WordPress Dashboard

It all started with a tweet by Torsten Landsiedel.

Alltag im WordPress Dashboard. pic.twitter.com/lofO7544uL

— Torsten Landsiedel (@zodiac1978) July 16, 2017

Working as WordPress Engineer at Inpsyde, I have seen something like that in the screenshot way too often. That’s why I decided to write up a simple plugin to save you from all these admin notices.

Dobby Takes Care of Your Admin Notices

Named after the friendly house elf from Harry Potter, Dobby captures everything that gets rendered on one of the admin notice hooks, and stores it in … err, a closet. If you wish, you can reveal the captured notices by clicking a button.

May I introduce…

…Dobby, the friendly Admin Elf, takes care of all your (unwanted) admin notices.

✨https://t.co/dE4vrSLmEa#WordPress pic.twitter.com/hXwtLyvw7O

— Thorsten Frommen (@thorstenfrommen) July 16, 2017

Not even half a day later, Dobby was highlighted in the latest issue of WP LETTER, the tweet had been liked and also retweeted quite a few times, and people had opened a few issues and even one pull request in Dobby’s GitHub repository.

In the evening, I went through all the issues, and got Dobby a cosmetic overhaul.

To be honest, Dobby was meant to be a joke. 🙊

But since you seem to like him so much, here's an update for you!

✨ https://t.co/G4IBC5kzVn pic.twitter.com/tkEqGiWEHZ

— Thorsten Frommen (@thorstenfrommen) July 17, 2017

Installation

Dobby is availabe via Composer. You can also grab the ZIP file at GitHub and upload it to your WordPress. Maybe I will also put it on WordPress.org. We’ll see…

Install it, activate it, love it.

Like Dobby?

So, what about you? Do you like Dobby? Did you know about the plugin already? Are you even using it?

Would you like me to put it on the official WordPress.org plugin directory? Done.

Please, let me know. Thanks.

Update (July 30, 2017): Dobby is now also listed in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

Update (August 1, 2017): Dobby has been to the WP Tavern.