Development, Miscellaneous, Tutorials

How to Change the WordPress “Howdy” Message to a Custom Welcome

by 7 Responses

Here’s a fun tip I found over at the WordPress StackExchange the other day. It’s a quick function that allows you to change the “Howdy” message that you usually see when you’re logged into the WordPress dashboard. I’ve used it to create my own custom message:

Add this to your theme’s functions.php file and customize the message: 

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add_filter('gettext', 'change_howdy', 10, 3);

function change_howdy($translated, $text, $domain) {

    if (!is_admin() || 'default' != $domain)
        return $translated;

    if (false !== strpos($translated, 'Howdy'))
        return str_replace('Howdy', 'Welcome', $translated);

    return $translated;
}

Replace the ‘Welcome’ with any custom greeting you like. Click save and refresh your dashboard to see the instant changes.

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Comments (7)

  3. While that changes it in the backend, my frontend users still see Howdy.

    I have yet to found a fix for this, and until then you may as well use the “Edit Howdy” plugin instead.

    • This Works

      // replace WordPress Howdy in WordPress 3.3
      function replace_howdy( $wp_admin_bar ) {
      $my_account=$wp_admin_bar->get_node(‘my-account’);
      $newtitle = str_replace( ‘Howdy,’, ‘Welcome’, $my_account->title );
      $wp_admin_bar->add_node( array(
      ‘id’ => ‘my-account’,
      ‘title’ => $newtitle,
      ) );
      }
      add_filter( ‘admin_bar_menu’, ‘replace_howdy’,25 );

      • Thanks Timothy, you really helped me out with that.
        Just a warning for anyone else copying and pasting this code though you may need to replace the inverted commas as I did. This may work straight away (or it may have been messed around with like Timothy’s code by the commenting system):

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        // replace WordPress Howdy in WordPress 3.3
function replace_howdy( $wp_admin_bar ) {
$my_account=$wp_admin_bar->get_node('my-account');
$newtitle = str_replace( 'Howdy,', 'Hi,', $my_account->title );
$wp_admin_bar->add_node( array(
'id' => 'my-account',
'title' => $newtitle,
) );
}
add_filter( 'admin_bar_menu', 'replace_howdy',25 );

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