In the first part of this tutorial I will show you how to remove WordPress default meta boxes

A simple meta box with multiple fields for “Pages” post type.

Remove Default Meta Boxes

On every edit post type page WordPress already has predefined meta boxes, you can even see a couple of them on the screenshot above, I mean “Page attributes” and “Featured image” of course.

There are two ways to remove a default metabox – using remove_meta_box() function or with the help of remove_post_type_support().

remove_meta_box()

Straight to the example. Let’s suppose that we have to remove both metaboxes I’ve already mentioned – “Page attributes” and “Featured image”. The code will be:

add_action( 'admin_menu', 'misha_remove_meta_box' );

function misha_remove_meta_box(){
	// Featured image
	remove_meta_box( 'postimagediv', 'page', 'normal' );
	// Page attributes
	remove_meta_box( 'pageparentdiv', 'page', 'normal' );
}

The first parameter of the function is a meta box ID, the easiest way to find out it is to inspect the code in your browser, but just in a case here is the list of default meta boxes IDs.

  • commentstatusdiv – Discussion,
  • slugdiv – Slug,
  • commentsdiv – Comments,
  • postexcerpt – Excerpt,
  • authordiv – Author,
  • revisionsdiv – Revisions,
  • postcustom – Custom Fields,
  • trackbacksdiv – Send Trackbacks,
  • categorydiv – Categories,
  • tagsdiv-post_tag – Tags,
  • {Taxonomy name}div – Any taxonomy,
  • submitdiv – Publish.

The second parameter of remove_meta_box() function is a post type you would like to remove it from.

remove_post_type_support()

Let’s try to do the same we did with remove_meta_box() function right now.

add_action( 'init', 'misha_remove_meta_box_2' );

function misha_remove_meta_box_2() {
	// Featured image
	remove_post_type_support( 'page', 'thumbnail' );
	// Page attributes
	remove_post_type_support( 'page', 'page-attributes' );
}

As you can see the code is similar, but at the same time is different. I think the most correct way to remove default WordPress meta boxes is with remove_post_type_support() function, because it actually turns off a specific feature for a specific post type, and remove_meta_box() function just removes a meta box.

Features / Meta Boxes:

  • thumbnail — Featured Image metabox
  • author — Author metabox
  • excerpt — Excerpt metabox
  • trackbacks — Send trackbacks metabox
  • custom-fields — Custom Fields metabox
  • comments — Comments metabox
  • revisions — Revisions metabox
  • page-attributes — Page Attributes metabox

You can also remove such areas as title or content editor:

  • title
  • editor
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