March Toolbox: Don’t just say hello and cleaning up the dashboard notifications

In today’s toolbox, we chat about cleaning up notifications in the WordPress dashboard, not saying hello, and a new theme called Olympus.

Saddle up. We’re going riding.

Cleaning up the notifications in your WordPress dashboard

Notifications.

We just assume this is part of life in the age in which we live. Everywhere we go, there are notifications.

Notifications via text messages, emails, on the sidewalk walking down the street, everywhere we look, there are notifications.

It seems to happen more and more inside the coveted WordPress administration dashboard.

Every plugin that has a lite version almost always has some kind of notification to upgrade.

Hey, I get it, they have to make money, and marketing is really hard. So why not piggyback on the already existing WordPress experience?

Justin Tadlock talks about the notifications that are now being a problem in the Block editor.

We can’t seem to get away from notifications.

Thankfully, Tadlock mentions a plugin that may help.

The Toolbelt plugin is a fascinating free plugin that gives you options to make little tweaks that many often want to make. It is modular meaning that you enable the tweak you want to make and not other tweaks.

One of the tweaks is the ability to “Tidy Plugin Notifications” that are added to a hidden panel to view when you want.

Some of the tweaks they use will likely allow you to eliminate other plugins. It is a very interesting tool for your toolbox.

Toolbelt also takes into account security,

“Toolbelt takes a privacy first approach to adding features. Everything happens on your server. No data is sent to third party servers without your explicit consent. No data is loaded from third parties (for example social sharing scripts).”

Now, if you don’t want to add Toolbelt and just want something to only clear up notifications, Clarity is an Adblocker for the WordPress dashboard.

“The plugin requires zero configuration. Simply install and activate Clarity and obtrusive ads will disappear.”

So, there is no need to actually enable or disable anything, just add and activate.

These tools can help you clean up that administration dashboard if that is something that bothers you or your client.

Don’t say hello and run

No Hello

Working in a team environment can come with its challenges. Am I right?

Sometimes it is hard to decipher the way we should interact online versus in person. I know I have been guilty of that myself.

Recently Birgit Pauli-Haack shared a website called “no hello” on Twitter.

As the website says,

“Imagine calling someone on the phone, going hello! then put them on hold… 🤦‍♀️”

The website, this tool, is a reminder of a little bit of an online working room environment. You see, oftentimes many people will use a Direct Message to ask a question, but often they stop with the greeting.

Someone actually explained this to me once. He explained that he wasn’t always available to read a message on the ready, go ahead and ask the question, and he will get back to me when he sees it.

We often think, because of the platform of choice for our DMs, the person is there and waiting to hear from us.

Slack, Facebook, and Skye will all have a notice claiming someone is available when in reality, it might not be true.

So, before you decide you are going to ask a question and start with a greeting waiting for a response before asking your question, stop. Think. Evaluate. Remember this website and don’t just say hello.

Olympus claims lightweight and blazingly fast

Olympus

Olympus, a new theme and blocks library, was released recently.

The theme claims to be “… blazingly fast, lightweight, fully responsive, SEO-ready, and 100% Vanilla JS WordPress Theme that pursues to deliver quality over quantity while implementing the best coding standards, making it a theme ideal for building scalable sites, from blogs to personal portfolios and mid to large business websites, multisite compatible, and WooCommerce ready.”

I did a quick install on my demo site and it is pretty intuitive. The blocks plugin only had six blocks.

The theme is pretty bare bones out of the box which means you can customize it to your heart’s content.

As far as the fewer blocks, maybe David McCan is right that they are meant to “… provide only a small number of blocks with the idea that these give the user what they need to build up their own composite blocks.”

According to McCan, Olympus is looking to be a hybrid theme allowing users to use Full Site Editing.

The focus for this theme here, according to the theme developers and McCan, is on performance.

It sounds similar to when we used to use bare-bones starter themes a few years ago and we could completely customize the theme stack.

If you are looking to adopt a new theme with these things in mind, Olympus might be worth the look.

Wrapping it up

How do you clean up WordPress dashboard notifications? Do they bother you or do you even notice them?

Learning online etiquette can be helpful when communicating with team members. It is important for us not to take advantage of someone’s time and leading with “hello” followed by the question may make quite a difference.

Have you tried Olympus yet? What did you think? Let us know in the MainWP Users Facebook Group.