HOWTO: Remove the Blubrry PowerPress "New!" Banner
The best thing about WordPress is the plugin infrastructure. A million little gadgets to make your blog better.
Sadly, there are all sorts of ways plugin authors can abuse their privileges. Dodgy code and user-hostile features sometimes make plugins more trouble than they're worth.
Recently, the normally excellent Blubrry PowerPress plugin pissed me off. It's a useful plugin for publishing podcasts on WordPress. They had a new feature - some kind of embedded audio player - and introduced it with a "New!" banner on the main menu.
That's... Fine I guess. You have to let people know about new features. And it wasn't too obnoxious. I took a look at their new stuff and decided it wasn't for me. I expected the banner to disappear.
It did not.
Look, this is a trivial thing but annoying to me. The red text on a white background is designed to be noticeable. And I kept noticing it while I was writing. Because it is a bit distracting. I asked in their support forums about removing it - but they said it would stay until a future update.
Well, the best thing about WordPress is that the plugins are hackable! There's a build in code editor which lets you change the functions of any plugin.
So I found where the "New!" banner was coded - powerpressadmin.php line 5282 and changed:
PHP
return '<sup style="'.$style.'">'. __('New!', 'powerpress') .'</sup>';
to
return '';
Hit save, refreshed the page, and the annoying thing was banished.
Maybe it'll come back in a future update. And maybe I'll fix it again. Or maybe I'll disable auto-updates. Or maybe I'll remove the plugin. Or maybe Blubrry will realise that annoying users isn't a great strategy.
Either way, if that's been bugging you, I hope you found this blog post to be useful.
