A year-and-a-half ago I released a plugin called Disable Blog.
Guess what it does: disables the blog on WordPress sites. (clever title, right?)
“Isn’t WordPress supposed to be a blog?”
WordPress has grown from a blog platform to a content management system. More recently it has progressed into an application framework/foundation.
No doubt, WordPress blog functionality is inherent to its core. And so it should be! Blogging is a useful device for much of the web. But the flip side, where it’s not utilized at all, exists on plenty of sites, too.
I have clients that only want WordPress for a static website, they don’t want or need a blog. I’ve experienced confusion around unwanted blog features at least eleventy-one times. I wanted to provide a better experience for my clients.
Okay, okay, okay – I’ll admit it: there’s an element of OCD involved for me here.
There are plugins to disable feeds, disable comments, disable XML_RPC, and even one that will hide your admin ‘post’ pages. But none were quite the solution I wanted.
Just hide everything!
I wanted a plugin to disable blog functionality across the board. From the obvious items like the “Post” admin menu to the “invisible” things like feed links.
It couldn’t sacrifice anything shared by blog and non-blog things alike. It needed to be flexible enough for custom post types and taxonomies. (A lot of my work revolves around custom content management).
For instance, posts and pages can have comments. It had to obscure any comments attached to posts, but still keep comments available for pages. Not to mention the near-infinite possibilities with custom post types that use the built-in categories/tags, comments, feeds, et cetera.
Other considerations, too: What if the site’s reading settings were set to blog and not to a static page? How do you deal with redirects and queries? What about author pages?
As you can see, it turned into a (fun) challenge.
The plugin.
My goal with this plugin is to make it seamless and I think it covers all the major bases:
- Disables the blog by hiding, redirecting, and/or completely turning off blog-related functionality. See the full list here.
- Simple path to a blog-free website, without any changes to your database/content. Deactivate it to go back to blogging.
- Custom post types and taxonomies support.
- Works on Multisite!
- There are a ton of filters to allow developers to tweak it further. (Documentation coming soon)
I am always finding little ways to improve a (see the To-Do list).
I just pushed out the newest release this last week. See the full changelog, if you’re interested.
View the plugin on Github and on WordPress.org
Please direct any issues to the Support Forums, not the comments below.
To comment/contribute, reach out on Github or contact me on this site.
Like the plugin? Please consider leaving a positive review.
Featured Image credit: Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash.
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