The dashboard is the first thing that greets you when you login to your WordPress website. Much like a car’s dashboard, this screen gives you a quick overview of the important parameters of your site. Everything you’d need while building and maintaining your site can be accessed from here.
WordPress Dashboard Preview
The dashboard invites you to ‘Customize Your Site’ and you could dive into that right away if you want to. However, if this is the first time you’ve setup WordPress, it might serve you better to get an overview of the various sections of the dashboard before you really start tweaking your site.
So let’s look at all the sections one by one. You might come across terms that you don’t understand right away, but that’s ok – we are just having a very brief overview here so you get an idea of the basic things that you can do while building your website. I’ll be covering each one of these in detail in the remaining lessons, so you’ll get a firm understanding of everything.
At the top of the screen is a grey colored bar called the Admin Bar containing a few convenience links while the sidebar on the left is broken down in to a number of sections, each of which deals with a particular action or an aspect of your site. We’ll have a look at both of these once we are through with the components in the center of the screen.
The Center Screen
The main section has a number of “boxes” or “windows”.
There is a ‘Right Now’ box which gives you a quick view of important stats – the number of pages and posts you have on your site and the categories and tags you use for organizing and classifying them into different topics. If you decide to allow comments on your posts, you can see how many comments are there in total and of them how many are approved (are visible on your site to be seen by your visitors), pending (still require your approval before they become visible) or spam (irrelevant to your site’s content).
The Right Now”Box”
Once your site is up and running this could be quite handy as you could, for example, quickly want to click on the comments requiring approval to approve/disapprove them and also have a look at the ones automatically classified as ‘spam’ by WordPress to make sure they indeed are spam and not genuine comments that look like spam.
Below these stats, you see which theme you are running on your site and with how many active widgets (interactive or informational features such as a “search” tool or a calendar, usually on either side of the main content area). Next, you see whether search engines like Google are allowed to go through your site’s content and show it on search results. On the last line, you see the version of WordPress you are running. If it is not the latest one, you are shown an option to upgrade to the latest one.
Recent Comments – Dashboard
The ‘Recent Comments’ shows you a preview of the most recent comments received on your site’s posts. The links at the bottom of this box and numbers beside them make it easy for you to jump to any of them, say for example, the pending comments and approve them.
When other sites link to some page or post on your website, you’ll be able to see this in your ‘Incoming Links’ box. Incoming links from other genuine sites are usually a good sign that the content you are providing on your site is worthy of sharing.
‘Plugins’ gives you an peek at the most popular and newest set of plugins being added to WordPress’s ever-growing list of free and premium plugins.
On the right side, you’ll see the ‘QuickPress’ area which helps you quickly publish content on your blog without bothering about formatting (which content is bold, which is underlined, which is a heading etc) and other related options like classifying your content into categories.
QuickPress – Dashboard
You can also just save a draft to return to it later (say, to finish your post or make it better before publishing). If you save it as a draft, you’ll see it in the ‘Recent Drafts’ box, just below the QuickPress box. You can pick any of your unfinished drafts from here before taking it to completion and publishing it.
‘WordPress Blog’ gives you the latest posts from the official WordPress Blog maintained by its creators. This usually talks about new releases and other major work going on with WordPress. The news section below it gives you links to new and trending topics about WordPress from across the community.
Some of the plugins that you install (we talk about Plugins in a later lesson), might decide to add their own ‘boxes’ to this page to give you some quick info.
Customizing the Dashboard
WordPress gives you the ability to customize the dashboard to better suit your needs and tastes.
For example, any of the “boxes” can be minimized by clicking on the downward arrow which appears near their top right corners when you hover your mouse near that area.
Minimize Boxes
The boxes can also be rearranged by left-clicking on their title bars and pulling them around to where they serve you better and then releasing the left-clicked mouse button. You’ll notice that as your try to place your box in a new area, the other nearby boxes will move up or down giving way for your box to find a new position.
Move Boxes Around – Dashboard
You can even completely remove a ‘box’ by unchecking its corresponding checkbox in the ‘Screen Options’ in the top right corner of the screen. The options in this ‘Screen Options’ pulldown tab keep changing according to your current screen, so always remember to look in there for any options relevant to the screen you are on.
Lastly, some of these boxes can be ‘configured’ by clicking on the Configure link that appears when you hover the mouse near their top-right hand corner (to the left of the downward arrow). Clicking on these will open up the parameters that are available for customization. For example, with the Recent Comments box, you can configure the maximum number of comments that appear in the box.
That pretty much covers the center screen. Let’s move on to the sidebar.
The Sidebar
The SIdebar
On the left of the screen, you see the “sidebar” with options stacked over one another. Hovering your mouse over most of these options will cause a menu to fly out with more sub-options. The very first of these options/links is the one on the top and is the dashboard itself. Clicking on this from anywhere will bring you to the dashboard, the screen you are right now on.
As we go over each one of these options, I recommend you to go to the dashboard in your own WordPress site and follow along by clicking on each option.
Posts are the central idea of blogs. They are like the day-to-day entries that you make in your journal. It has four sub-options.
- All Posts takes you to a list of all the posts you have created so far. Of course you haven’t created any posts yet, but WordPress inserts its very own first post called ‘Hello World’ to give you a start. You can modify or delete any of the posts in the list.
- Add Post allows you to create a new post.
- Categories allows you to create, edit or delete categories – broad areas that you can classify your posts under – and subcatgories.
- Tags – another way of classifying content – gives you the same kind of options with respect to tags. At this point, you could be slightly uncertain of the differences between categories and tags since they seem to serve the same purpose of classifying content under different buckets but we will discuss that and a few other initial doubts anyone can have in a separate lesson later in this series.
Media refers to the different types of files that you can add to your website’s content. These can include images, audio and video files besides any other type of file like, for example, zip files that you can make available for download. You can add new media files and maintain them in a library. For each of the files, you can specify various attributes that are relevant to its file type. For example, for an image file, you can specify a caption. When required, you can readily include a media file from this library in your posts or pages or in the other areas like your website’s sidebars or headers.
Pages are also content but they are the kind that form the static non-changing areas of a website, like the ‘About Us’ or ‘Contact’ page that you would see in lots of websites. You can add, edit or delete pages just like with posts.
The Comments option gives you a list of all the comments that have been added to your posts by your visitors with the most recently added comments showing on the top. You can approve, disapprove, edit (for example if the comment contains swear words) or reply to the comments right from within your dashboard.
The next section is Appearance which gives you a whole lot of options to customize your site’s design. You can change your site’s theme – the overall look-and-feel of your website. You can change your site’s logo or name in the Header option and the background colour or image in Background. In Widgets you can position small features like search boxes, calendars, “most popular posts” and many others in various places on your site, as supported by your current theme. Menus lets you create menus to help your visitors find the content they are interested in. Some themes add some more features to this section which lets you further customize your site’s design.
Plugins lets you search and install new plug-ins to your site. When any of the plugins are updated by their authors, you can upgrade them from within the Plugins screen. You can also deactivate or remove plugins that you no longer require.
WordPress lets you get others onboard in running your site, whether you want them to simply contribute content to your site as authors or want to give them more power in managing your site as an additional administrator. To enable all of this, you can create multiple users and give each of them a role like an admin, editor or an author. Users covers all of this functionality.
The Tools section provides you with, well, tools that can be really handy sometimes. These include options to export your WordPress website into a format which can then be used to create your site elsewhere and populate it with all the content of the old one.
Settings is the last section and pretty much contains settings for just about everything right from your site title to how your URLs (web page addresses) should look.
- General settings cover details like your site title, the tag line and the like.
- Writing and Reading are settings for content-creation as well as how your visitors see it on your site.
- Settings relating to commenting on your posts is covered in Discussion.
- Media covers all the settings for your uploaded media files like images and videos.
- Privacy deals with whether search engines are allowed to index your site.
- Permalinks deals with how your web addresses should look.
These are all quite a lot of settings and we will discuss them at the very last once we are done with all the features they deal with, since then they will make a lot more sense than now.
The Admin Bar
This is the grey bar that goes right across the top of the screen. It is pretty compact now and neatly puts together the things that require your attention plus the actions you can most commonly take.
The Admin Bar
At the very left is the WordPress icon that spills links to important WordPress pages like documentation and support forums. The next one is the link to your own site (yourdomain.com). This can be very handy when you make a change to your site and want to see how it looks on your site right away.
Then comes two arrows forming a circle with a number next to them. The numeral indicates the number of things that need to be updated (like your plugins and themes). You won’t see this in a newly installed WordPress site because you’d already have the latest of everything when you newly install WP. It is as time goes by that you’d find that newer versions of plugins (or themes) are released and find yourself wanting to update them. It is generally very important for the sake of security to keep everything about your WordPress site updated to its latest version.
The next one is a callout cloud that quickly tells you how many comments need your approval before becoming visible on the site. It is always a good practice to deal with comments as soon as possible.
The final one is the +New item which drops down into various options for creating new posts, pages, media files or users.
All of these links in the Admin Bar, if you notice, are actually handy short-cuts. You can access each one the screens linked to from here, from the sidebar or elsewhere.
As you can see, there’s a whole lot of features and functionality packed into WordPress (and we haven’t even looked at plugins yet!) and you can put them into play from your dashboard. This lesson was a bird’s eye view of the options available. We will look at each one of them in much more detail in the coming lessons.
In the next lesson, we will make the very first changes to the site by setting the title and the site’s tagline.
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