How to replace “Howdy,” with your own text

At WordCamp Bournemouth earlier this month someone mentioned that their customer really disliked the “Howdy,” message at the top right of the WordPress admin bar. There are already a number of plugins that replace the text. I looked at a couple and they did similar things, some doing it better than others.

Plugin name and description	Plugin links	Version, total downloads, last update, tested
Edit Howdy This plugin allows you to change the "Howdy" message to whatever text message you would like.	edit-howdy home	1.0.3 5789 2014-12-14 8:34pm GMT 3.3.2
Contributors: manoj kumar *This plugin allow you to replace the "Howdy" text with "your text". *you can also replace login logo and login username	change-login-screen-to-your-choice home	1.0.1 968 2014-01-06 12:19pm GMT 3.7.29
Remove Howdy Remove the "Howdy" text in the top right corner of your dashboard.	remove-howdy home	1.0 8267 2018-12-09 10:16pm GMT 5.0.4
Replace Howdy With Welcome This plugin will simply allow you to replace the "Howdy" text in the top right…	replace-howdy-with-welcome home	1.0 3738 2013-07-16 5:37pm GMT 3.5.2
CJ Change Howdy A slick WP plugin that lets you change the "Howdy" text.	cj-change-howdy home	3.3.1 3332 2012-02-18 5:33pm GMT 3.3.2
sk-replace-howdy	No info available
TM Replace Howdy Banish the "Howdy" greeting from the WordPress admin area with this simple to use plugin!	tm-replace-howdy home	1.4.2 9874 2015-11-20 4:01pm GMT 4.4.18

Prior to WordPress 3.3 the only method available was to use the gettext filter. This was a big overhead. From version 3.3 plugins were able to use the admin_bar_menu hook. Plugins which use admin_bar_menu vs gettext

Plugin	admin_bar_menu	gettext	Notes
edit-howdy	n	y	Don’t use
change-login-screen-to-your-choice	y	n	Contains other code you may not want
remove-howdy	y	n	No replacement string
replace-howdy-with-welcome	y	n	Displays “Welcome”
cj-change-howdy	y	n	Defaults to “Welcome”
sk-replace-howdy	y	n	Nice admin code
tm-replace-howdy	y	Y – pre WP 3.3	Defaults to a random alternative

Having looked at them all, if I were to have chosen any of these plugins it would have been sk-replace-howdy. But, for oik version 2.3, I’ve developed what I believe to be a slightly improved solution. It replaces the string regardless of language. There’s no bloat as I’m already using oik for far more than this function. If you’re not already an oik plugin user then perhaps you should look into some of its other capabilities. PS. oik v2.3 also allows you to use your logo image as the login image. AND that’s another blog post in its own right.