Sick of seeing the Hello Dolly plugin on all of your WordPress installations even when you don’t have it installed?  I know I am.  That’s why I sucked it up and changed it.  It didn’t take that long before I could think of some song that could be as influential as “Hello Dolly.”

What it is

Hello Dolly is a plugin that randomly displays a lyric from the song “Hello, Dolly” on each page of your WordPress admin.  Hello Ziggy is a modification which instead uses the lyrics to “Ziggy Stardust” by David Bowie.

This is a branch of Matt Mullenweg‘s Hello Dolly plugin that puts the lyrics to “Ziggy Stardust” in the top corner of wp-admin.  As an added bonus, all you need to do is unzip and upload, and it replaces the original Hello Dolly plugin. This only works until you update your WordPress installation because the update overwrites the Hello plugin, restoring Dolly again.  So I’ve forked it into its’ own plugin.  Shucks.

Yeah, that’s all.  Props and thanks go to Matt, who actually wrote the thing.  I just replaced the lyrics.  And hey, if you want to do that, too, you can!  Just open hello.php and find the line that says:

function hello_dolly_get_lyric() {
/** These are the lyrics to Ziggy Stardust */
	$lyrics =

and replace the lyrics to Ziggy Stardust (in quotes) to whatever song you want.  Be sure to change the name and give yourself a pat on the back, too, like I did

/**
 * @package Hello Ziggy
 * @author Matt Mullenweg, c.s.reynolds
 * @version 1.5.1
 */
/*
Plugin Name: Hello Ziggy
Plugin URI: http://wp.thinktank-studio.com/ziggy
Description: This is not just a plugin, it symbolizes the hope and enthusiasm of an entire 
generation-- okay, yeah, it's just a plugin. When activated you will randomly see a lyric from
<cite>Ziggy Stardust</cite> in the upper right of your admin screen on every page.  All thanks
goes to <a href="http://ma.tt">Matt</a> for writing the original Hello Dolly plugin.

Author: Matt Mullenweg, c.s.reynolds
Version: 1.5
Author URI: http://www.jazzsequence.com
*/