Today we are going to introduce a complete WordPress Dashboard Tutorial to get you started with WordPress. In this WordPress tutorial, you would learn how to open WordPress dashboard page and all the menu options to customize WordPress dashboard.
The WordPress Dashboard (or WordPress Admin Dashboard) is the first screen which you will see when you log into the admin area of your blog. The Dashboard displays a brief overview of your WordPress website.
The WordPress Dashboard is actually a collection of gadgets or widgets that provide an overview of what's happening on your WordPress blog. You can see more detail or do customization as per your needs by using some quick links such as Write a New Blog post, writing quick draft, view and reply to latest comments, or just see the count of posts and list of recently published articles etc.
You can access your WordPress dashboard by typing the following address into the web browser:
http://yoursite.com/wp-admin
The WordPress Dashboard is divided into few parts and can be categorized as shown in the following illustration. These sections are individually discussed in-depth, following the image.
WordPress Dashboard Tutorial (Dashboard Page)
Now let’s look at some details on each of the sections identified in the above illustration.
Welcome Menu:
This section includes a big "Customize Your Site" button which allows customization of your WordPress theme options.
The center column, named as "Next Steps", provides some of the most basic but useful links such as creating a new blog post, creating a new page and view the front end of your website.
The last column, named as "More Actions", contains links to customize widgets, menus, settings related to comments, and also a link to a basic guide featured by WordPress Codex.
At a Glance:
This section shows an overview of your blog's posts, number of published posts and pages, any pending comments, and the total number of comments.
When you click on these links, you will be taken to the respective option page where you can manage them. It also displays the current version of WordPress you are running, along with the theme name you are currently using on the site.
Quick Draft:
The Quick Draft includes a mini post editor which provides facility to write & save a post from within the WordPress dashboard. It includes two fields, a title field for the draft and a test area to write some detail. It contains one single button to save the detail as a Draft.
Activity:
The Activity widget shows latest published posts, comments, and shows comment counts. It also allows you to approve, disapprove, edit, delete, reply, and even marking a comment to spam.
WordPress Event & News:
The WordPress Event & News widget displays the latest news and events such as latest community meetups, software release document, updates, alerts, news regarding the software etc from the official WordPress blog.
Screen Options Menu:
The WordPress Screen Options Menu is a versatile and dynamic menu, and used to show or hide different widgets or section on the screen. It shows different options in different sections of WordPress. And it uses checkboxes to show or hide screen options that enables you to customize sections on the admin screen.
In the main dashboard section, the screen option is used to control (show/hide) different types of widgets that are shown on WordPress dashboard page. The default screen options of WordPress main dashboard is shown in below image:
WordPress Dashboard Tutorial (Main Menu - Left Sidebar)
The WordPress Dashboard comes with a default navigation menu shown in the left sidebar. This navigation menu is also the main menu of WordPress.
This menu contains some most useful links that would be using frequently. We would be discussing all those menus in detail in our next few tutorials. For now we would be learning their names and brief description about them.
Dashboard:
Yes it’s the first menu under the WordPress main menu. It contains two sub-menus "Home" & "Updates". The "Home" is for coming back to the main WordPress dashboard anytime from inside any menu. The "Updates" section is there to notify you about any new software updates released for WordPress Core, or Themes, or plugins.
Posts:
This Menu has four sections. The first section “All Posts” takes you to a page where you will see all of the articles you have posted and also allows you to create new posts.
2nd option “Add New” enables you to create a new post instantly. See our guide on how to properly create and publish a post.
Rest two options categories & tags are there to manage categories and tags that you can use to categorize your blog posts into different subjects. As you can see in our CertGuidance website that all the different subjects are categorized by different category name & tags, one such category is WordPress Tutorial. See our beginner's guide on managing WordPress categories.
Media:
The media section is dedicated to managing all the media uploads done by you. It has two sub menus “Library” and “Add New”. “Library” is the media library of WordPress, where all of your image & video uploads would be stored. The “Add New” option is there to provide you a mechanism to quickly upload new images or videos.
Pages:
WordPress Pages are static pages that you can publish. The “Pages” menu allows you to view, edit, delete, manage, and publish new pages, such as Homepage, Contact Page etc. Unlike Posts, the pages can’t have any category or tag assigned to it.
See our guide on How to Properly Create and Manage WordPress Pages.
Comments:
The Comment Section allows you to do moderation, deletion, or reply to user comments to your blog posts.
Appearance:
Here you can Install New Themes, Customize the look and feel of your current theme, place custom widgets to themes widget space, menus, Set background image, header image, and even you can edit source files of themes or widgets to tweak their behavior.
Plugins:
Through this option, you can install new plugin either from WordPress.org’s plugins directory or can upload your own custom plugin. You can also fully manage those plugins, such as enabling, disabling, uninstalling, or can change plugin specific settings. See our beginner's guide to managing WordPress plugins.
Users:
This section is dedicated to managing WordPress Users. Here users mean registered users such as administrators, moderators, editors, subscribers etc. Here you can create, delete, modify, or assign appropriate profiles or access levels to each of individual users.
Tools:
Though not much used, this section lists some tools to import and export WordPress settings, posts, pages etc. Import tools are useful if you want to migrate to WordPress from any other hosted CMS like Blogger.com, Blogroll.com, or want to restore your site from static WordPress backup files etc. The Export tab is used to export WordPress, posts, pages, settings etc and save them as local files.
We recommend using some powerful backup plugins instead.
Settings:
This contains all the settings you can use to change the default behavior of WordPress. We would not be detailing the settings here as we have dedicated tutorials on how the default WordPress settings work and how to change them.
[Tutorial: Exploring WordPress Settings Menu]
Collapse Menu:
Last but not least, this button helps minify the WordPress Sidebar menu to provide you more screen space and a cleaner compact design.
We hope that you have enjoyed the WordPress dashboard tutorial. Be with us to explore free training on Leading Technologies and Certifications.
Leave us some comments if you have any question or facing any issue with the customization of WordPress Dashboard, we would be very happy to help you.
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