Description
WordPress greets every logged-in user with “Howdy” in the top-right corner of the admin bar. It is friendly, but it is not for everyone — it reads oddly to non-American audiences, and it rarely fits a client site you have spent time branding.
Change Howdy replaces that greeting with whatever you want. Set it once under Settings > Change Howdy and it applies everywhere the admin bar appears, in the dashboard and on the front end.
Features
- Set any greeting text you like from a simple settings screen.
- Position the user’s name with a
%splaceholder — writeHi %s, good to see you, or leave the placeholder out to drop the name entirely. - Applies in the admin and on the front-end admin bar.
- Ships in English and Hindi (हिन्दी), and is ready to translate into any other language.
- Works on translated installs, not just English ones.
- No database tables, no scripts, no styles, no tracking, no ads, no upsells.
- Cleans up after itself when you delete it.
How it works
The plugin hooks the admin bar’s account node directly and rewrites its greeting. It does not filter every translated string on the page, so there is no measurable performance cost.
Privacy
Change Howdy collects nothing, stores nothing about your visitors, and makes no external requests. It saves a single option, change_howdy_greeting, in your own database.
Screenshots
Installation
From your dashboard
- Go to Plugins > Add New.
- Search for Change Howdy.
- Click Install Now, then Activate.
- Go to Settings > Change Howdy and enter your greeting.
Manual installation
- Download the plugin ZIP file.
- Go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin and choose the file, or unzip it into
/wp-content/plugins/. - Activate the plugin through the Plugins screen.
- Go to Settings > Change Howdy and enter your greeting.
The greeting defaults to “Welcome” until you change it, so the plugin does something useful the moment it is activated.
FAQ
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Where do I change the text?
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Settings > Change Howdy, or click the Settings link next to Change Howdy on the Plugins screen.
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How does the %s placeholder work?
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Whatever you type is used as-is, with
%sswapped for the user’s display name. There is only that one rule, so every layout is possible:Welcome, %srenders as “Welcome, Jane” — this is the default.Hi %s, good to see yourenders as “Hi Jane, good to see you”.Dashboardrenders as “Dashboard”, with no name at all.
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Can I show the greeting without the user’s name?
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Yes — leave the
%splaceholder out of your text and only your text is shown. -
Does it work on the front end?
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Yes. Earlier versions only changed the greeting inside the admin. Since 26.0 the front-end admin bar is covered too.
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Which languages does the plugin come in?
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English and Hindi (हिन्दी). On a Hindi site the settings screen appears in Hindi and the default greeting reads “स्वागत है, {name}” without you changing anything.
The plugin is fully translation-ready, so any other language can be added. If you would like to see it in yours, translations are very welcome at https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/change-howdy/ — there are only nine short strings.
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Does it work on a translated site?
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Yes. Earlier versions searched for the literal English word “Howdy” and silently did nothing on non-English installs. Version 26.0 rebuilds the greeting in the active locale, so the replacement works whatever language you run WordPress in.
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Is it multisite compatible?
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Yes. Each site keeps its own greeting, and deleting the plugin removes the option from every site in the network.
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What happens to my setting if I uninstall?
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Deleting the plugin removes its option from the database. Deactivating leaves it in place, so you can deactivate and reactivate without losing your greeting.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Change Howdy” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “Change Howdy” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
26.0
Major rewrite. The plugin now uses year-based version numbers.
- Added: settings screen under Settings > Change Howdy — the greeting is no longer hardcoded.
- Added:
%splaceholder support for positioning the user’s display name. - Added: Settings shortcut on the Plugins screen.
- Added: Hindi (hi_IN) translation, and a translation template for every other language.
- Added: uninstall routine, including multisite networks.
- Changed: the default greeting is now translatable, so a translated install greets people in its own language before anything is configured.
- Added: GPL-2.0 license file and full license headers.
- Fixed: the greeting now changes on the front-end admin bar, not only in the admin.
- Fixed: the replacement now works on non-English installs, which it never did before.
- Changed: replaced the site-wide
gettextfilter with a targetedadmin_bar_menuhook, removing the overhead of filtering every translated string in the admin. - Changed: translations load on
initto avoid the_load_textdomain_just_in_timenotice introduced in WordPress 6.7. - Changed: code reorganised, documented and brought in line with the WordPress coding standards.
- Tested against WordPress 7.0.
2.0
- Added compatibility tag.
1.0
- First release.