WordPress has tons of features, but most clients just need to edit pages and want a content management system. I needed to get rid of all the fat.
Complicated Menus
To get rid of the menus on the dashboard for all roles except the admin place the following code in the functions.php of your theme.
function remove_menus () {
global $menu;
if (!(current_user_can('install_themes'))) {
$restricted = array(__('Dashboard'), __('Posts'), __('Media'), __('Links'), __('Pages'), __('Appearance'), __('Tools'), __('Users'), __('Settings'), __('Comments'), __('Plugins'));
}
else {
return;
}
end ($menu);
while (prev($menu)){
$value = explode(' ',$menu[key($menu)][0]);
if(in_array($value[0] != NULL?$value[0]:"" , $restricted)){unset($menu[key($menu)]);}
}
}
add_action('admin_menu', 'remove_menus');
Thanks to http://www.wprecipes.com/how-to-remove-menus-in-wordpress-dashboard
Redirected Login
A problem that arises from this is the dashboard is pretty much useless. You can use this plugin to redirect a user to a specific page based on their role: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/peters-login-redirect/
Easy TinyMCE adjustments
One plugin that makes this very simple: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/