Extra Tip: Removing Admin Menus

While writing various plugins, I’ve come across the need (or want more likely) to remove some entries from the WordPress admin menus. While there isn’t an immediate API hook for this, there is still a quick bit of code to allow you to remove the items. Let’s say for example that we would like to remove the Comments menu under Manage. If you look in /wp-admin/menu.php, you’ll find something like the following (unimportant bits stripped out of course):

$menu[10] = array(__(‘Manage’), ‘edit_posts’, ‘edit.php’);
…
$submenu[‘edit.php’][20] = array(__(‘Comments’), ‘edit_posts’, ‘edit-comments.php’);

Each item in the $menu array represents a top-level menu item, while each item in the $submenu array represents one of the submenu pages. So how can we remove the menus? unset() of course.

function prefix_remove_menu() {
global $submenu;
unset($submenu[‘edit.php’][20]);
}
add_action(‘admin_header’, ‘prefix_remove_menu’);

If you really wanted, you could change that to something like this, and remove top menu items instead.

function prefix_remove_menu() {
global $menu;
unset($menu[10]);
}
add_action(‘admin_header’, ‘prefix_remove_menu’);