WordPress Clear Line Theme – Hide Site Admin, Login, Entries RSS

29 Jan 2012

The default settings in the WordPress Clearline Theme (and most WordPress themes) will display a box of settings containing things like “Site Admin”, “Login”, “Entries RSS”, etc. This is called the Meta Widget.

Unfortunately this Meta Widget can really distract from the visual quality of your site, and it’s a slight security risk (though hiding it won’t stop evildoers from working out that you’re running WordPress).

There’s a couple of options for hiding the Meta Widget:

• don’t display it at all. Go to Appearance -> Widgets, find the Sidebar that Meta is being displayed in, and delete it. You can then login to your blog by going to the /wp-login.php page. For example if your blog is http://myblog.info, go to http://myblog.info/wp-login.php to login
• make it smaller and barely visible (the option I prefer). First of all, go to Appearance -> Widgets and move/add a Meta Widget to the Footer Counters Sidebar (this Sidebar is specific to the Clearline Theme). Then, you need to edit the wp-includes/default-widgets.php file. Search for the line that contains wp_register (about line 293), then delete the three lines that contain ‘rss2_url’, ‘comments_rss2_url’, and ‘wordpress.org’, and remove the bulleting from ‘wp_loginout’. The changes are easier to see with some before and after code:

Before:

<ul>
<?php wp_register(); ?>
<li><?php wp_loginout(); ?></li>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" title=...
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?...
<li><a href="http://wordpress.org/" title="<?php ec...
<?php wp_meta(); ?>
</ul>

After:

<ul>
<?php wp_register(); ?>
<?php wp_loginout(); ?>
<?php wp_meta(); ?>
</ul>

Now, you’ll have a small Login link at the bottom right-hand corner of your blog!

Addendum

If you take the second option (making the Meta Widget smaller and barely visible), you may have noticed you get a small “Site Admin” link when logged in (at the bottom right of the page). You can fix this by editing the wp-includes/general-template.php file. At about line 319, change:

$link = $before . '<a href="' . admin_url()...

to:

$link = '';