Disabling CMB2 styles on a whole site

2-minute read

Disabling CMB2 styles site wide with a filter solution.

The problem

I’ve been using (Custom Meta Boxes 2)[<https://github.com/WebDevStudios/CMB2>] to quickly add meta boxes to pages and posts for a while and while I’m not that sensible to visual styles I can understand the styles CMB2 ships with might to be the best in any situation.
CMB2 provides an easy way to disable its styles on a per meta box base setting the meta box cmb2_styles attribute to false

$meta_boxes['test_metabox'] = array(
    'id'            => 'test_metabox',
    'title'         => __( 'Test Metabox', 'cmb2' ),
    'object_types'  => array( 'page', ), // Post type
    'context'       => 'normal',
    'priority'      => 'high',
    'show_names'    => true, // Show field names on the left
    // 'cmb_styles' => false, // false to disable the CMB stylesheet
    // 'closed'     => true, // Keep the metabox closed by default
    'fields'        => array(
        ...

but that’s a distributed solution that’s not easy to turn on and off for a whole site.

A filter solution

The way I’ve solved the issue is using a simple must use plugin that will dequeue CMB2 styles no matter what the setting on the single meta boxes is.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: CMB2 site-wide style killer
Description: Disables CMB2 styles in the whole site no matter the single meta boxes setting.
Author: Luca Tumedei
Author URI: http://theaveragedev.local
Version: 1.0
*/

add_action( 'admin_enqueue_scripts', function () {
        wp_dequeue_style( 'cmb2-styles' );
}, 999 );

This will work used as a normal plugin too.