Thanks for your time.
I want to have the WordPress dashboard treat Posts (vanilla, not custom post types or anything) exactly as normal, but to replace the word with something else. I've tried plugins that claim to do this and they replace it in some locations but not others.
The hardest location to change has been at "view all posts" where the word stubbornly refuses to change from "Posts" at the title even with site-wide text replacement via plugin.
What is the correct way to inform WordPress that I want to call Posts by a different name?
Answer
Put this in your functions.php file (obviously change "News Articles" to whatever you want the post name to be):
// Function to change "posts" to "news" in the admin side menu
function change_post_menu_label() {
global $menu;
global $submenu;
$menu[5][0] = 'News Articles';
$submenu['edit.php'][5][0] = 'News Articles';
$submenu['edit.php'][10][0] = 'Add News Article';
$submenu['edit.php'][16][0] = 'Tags';
echo '';
}
add_action( 'admin_menu', 'change_post_menu_label' );
// Function to change post object labels to "news"
function change_post_object_label() {
global $wp_post_types;
$labels = &$wp_post_types['post']->labels;
$labels->name = 'News Articles';
$labels->singular_name = 'News Article';
$labels->add_new = 'Add News Article';
$labels->add_new_item = 'Add News Article';
$labels->edit_item = 'Edit News Article';
$labels->new_item = 'News Article';
$labels->view_item = 'View News Article';
$labels->search_items = 'Search News Articles';
$labels->not_found = 'No News Articles found';
$labels->not_found_in_trash = 'No News Articles found in Trash';
}
add_action( 'init', 'change_post_object_label' );
And if you are worried about translation (based on the comments to your question), just add the appropriate __( 'News Articles', 'my-text-domain' ); function for each item...