New Dashboard Welcome Area cannot be changed or removed

[npetetin]

Although every dashboard content element has been customizable for a long time, 3.3 introduced Welcome Area, which is great actually but completely hard-coded! No way to change any bit or remove it without changing wp-admin/index.php itself!

Please call 'wp_welcome_panel' via a new action hook ASAP.

[nacin]

We *should* move it to a hook, but see how ​http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hide-welcome-panel-for-multisite/ handles it.

[npetetin]

The only thing this plugin does is hiding it by default, am I right? It still may be displayed by checking the screen option with the exact same hard-coded content. So it doesn't fix the issue at all, it's just hiding it behind an option.

What's definitely required is the same level of customization by plugins as the dashboard had reached until now. Without it, it's just a 3 year step back.

WP has reached a high level of maturity, especially since version 3. It has attracted a large amount of business projects and many professional solutions now rely on it. So when such new features are added, please give them the same level of maturity. It's the exact same issue with the new about page by the way...

[TJNowell]

What I'd really like to be able to do is add in the extra items for custom themes, additional blocks/rows/tabs etc so that New clients don't end up with a new WordPress banner followed by a 'hey new user here's the stuff one of your superiors paid us to add' double whammy, with two separate UIs etc

[senlin]

Clearly and unfortunately this has not been solved for the upcoming release. So for now there is only the possibility to hide the panel for registered users? Hiding is not the same as removing and as you can remove the rest of the dashboard relatively easily, this should definitely be possible for this intrusive panel!

// credits EAMann freely adapted from Andrew Nacin: http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/36404/2015
add_action( 'load-index.php', 'hide_welcome_panel' );

function hide_welcome_panel() {
    $user_id = get_current_user_id();

    if ( 1 == get_user_meta( $user_id, 'show_welcome_panel', true ) )
        update_user_meta( $user_id, 'show_welcome_panel', 0 );
}

[lightningspirit]

Creates a new action hook inside wp-admin/index.php to solve the issue realted to wp_welcome_panel() being called hardcoded

[SergeyBiryukov]

Version number indicates when the bug was initially introduced/reported.

[bananastalktome]

+1 on this. Also, why is the edit_theme_options capability check used as a shortcut out of the wp_welcome_panel function? The "Basic Settings" section still applies to users without this capability.

[bpetty]

I believe this is resolved in 3.4, and since it's not really a "bug", I think this can be closed now.

[ocean90]

Nothing fixed here.

[npetetin]

Thank you ocean90 to reopen it, there's absolutely nothing new about it in WP 3.4!
Please see 19972.diff, this is exactly what to do in my opinion.

[martythornley]

Related to #21331.

I added a patch there for new filters that allow you to fully manipulate the whole dashboard page.

[helenyhou]

Actually, #21331 looks to me a duplicate in intent, and we can call this fixed in [22018].

[helenyhou]

#21331 was marked as a duplicate.

[npetetin]

Perfect with [22018].

Thanks.