WordPress is quite customizable with plugins, so I thought it would be easy to hide some of the things on the Write Post page that I don’t use. Write a plugin that hooks into one of the page’s actions and spits out some CSS to hide those elements by id would’ve done it in ten minutes. Instead, the page has some later dynamic rendering that hardcodes styles onto the elements, making them impossible to override. (Firebug was quite useful in figuring that out.)
The much messier solution was to use HTML comments to hide most of the unwanted elements and the above described plugins to tweak the few with proper semantics. Furthermore, you can’t just hide all the form inputs, because then WordPress will default to closing off comments and pings. These two therefore got copied into a div hidden with CSS.
There’s also some funky rendering going on, so that some of the remaining elements spill out of the box that would seem to contain them. For now, though, it meets my needs; if you’d like to do something similar, you can download my changes as a starting point.
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