[wp-hackers] Possible to remove elements of 2.5 admin?

[Jeremy Clarke]

@ Jeremy Visser: That video is hilarious and informative, thank you.

@ Ozh: Thanks a lot, that is a very useful one-liner that will fix the
plugin for now.

However, I have to run the js AFTER the #categorydiv has already
loaded (i put it in admin_footer). Is there some way I can have it be
removed before/as it is loaded, so that the browser never even gets
it?

As it is our long category list (all countries, tons of topics and
tons of languages) actually causes a long wait as it is loaded, which
is felt as seeing the top of the page (including the sidebar which
actually comes first in the HTML) but waiting for the #categorydiv to
load before you can see the bottom (and before the
editor/media-buttons resolve fully with their js). With the CSS and
Jquery to turn off the div once it's loaded this means a long wait
with nothing to show in the end. In our specific case we also have the
tags div turned off through CSS because we just don't use tags, which
I think adds to the time spent floundering just below the post box but
before the 'advanced options'.

I tried actually removing the tags and categories blocks from
wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php and the whole write page sped up like
crazy and behaved how I would expect despite the fact that the one
sidebar instance of the categories still existed.

Thoughts? It still makes sense to me to use the metaboxes api for the
default metaboxes. Having a way to fully remove unwanted elements
makes more sense than faking it with js and css (not to mention the
maintenance nightmare of using content scraping as was done in the
past). It would also make it easier to do little things like move the
tags into 'advanced' without actually changing anything about the
metabox itself. We love it with the widgets, and so far I'm loving it
with the Dashboard Widgets, why not the write panel too?

--
Jeremy Clarke | http://simianuprising.com
Code and Design | http://globalvoicesonline.org