How to remove a metabox from menu editor page?

Question

I am not sure if it is much different for any page but I am wondering how to remove a metabox from the appearance>menu page without having to go into the wordpress core files and remove it. Is there something I can do to override it so it doesn't appear both on the page and on the screen options menu?

Answer 1

By inspecting the file /wp-admin/nav-menus.php we can see that these meta-boxes:

are rendered with:

<?php do_meta_boxes( 'nav-menus', 'side', null ); ?>

The file /wp-admin/includes/nav-menu.php contains the corresponding add_meta_box() calls and from that we can construct the relevant removal code:

function custom_remove() {      
    remove_meta_box('nav-menu-theme-locations', 'nav-menus', 'side'); 
    remove_meta_box('add-custom-links', 'nav-menus', 'side'); 
    remove_meta_box('add-post', 'nav-menus', 'side'); 
    remove_meta_box('add-page', 'nav-menus', 'side'); 
    remove_meta_box('add-category', 'nav-menus', 'side'); 
}
add_action('admin_head-nav-menus.php', 'custom_remove');

where we can use for example the admin_head-nav-menus.php action since it is called before these meta-boxes are rendered.

If you have a custom post type (or a custom taxonomy) then you can remove it's meta-box with

   remove_meta_box( 'add-xxx' , 'nav-menus' , 'side' ); 

where xxx is the corresponding name.

You can further check out the functions wp_nav_menu_setup(), wp_nav_menu_post_type_meta_boxes() and wp_nav_menu_taxonomy_meta_boxes() to see how the meta-boxes are added.

Answer 2

if (!is_admin()) return;

// See https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/wp_nav_menu_taxonomy_meta_boxes/
// $taxonomy_object is of type WP_Post_Type

add_filter('nav_menu_meta_box_object', function ($taxonomy_object) {

if (in_array($taxonomy_object->name, ['page', 'post', 'category'] )) {
  return null;
}

return $taxonomy_object;