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In this fist video, I’ll be taking you through WordPress’ administrator dashboard.
The Dashboard gives you access to all the options and features available in WordPress.
To access the Dashboard simply click on your theme’s login link.
If your theme does not have a “log-in” link; type “/wp-admin” after your website’s
URL in your browser’s address bar. Enter your user name and password to access
the administrator dashboard. After successfully logging into WordPress,
the Dashboard will be the first page that you will see.
The Dashboard is made up of 3 sections: Admin Bar,
The main navigation, The work area,
The Admin Bar appears in on every page of your site, including the public view of your
site, but it is only visible to users who logged into your website. So normal visitors
will not see this. The Admin Bar shows the name of your website;
when you hover over it a link to visit your homepage appears. Clicking on either the name
of your website or the link below will take you to the public view of your site.
In the public view, the dropdown menu under your website’s name has more links that
will take to back to different pages within your administrator dashboard.
In the public view of your site you also get a search bar located on the far right of the
admin bar, to use it, click on the magnify glass and type any keyword or phrase of the
post or page you are looking for then hit “enter” on your keyboard.
Clicking on your site’s name again will bring you back into the dashboard.
Notice that the search tab no longer appears when you are in the dashboard.
Hovering over the username on the right side of the admin bar will reveal links to your
profile settings and a link to log you out of WordPress.
You will also see the first and last name of the user who is currently logged in; Along
with a picture and a user name. To change any of these click on the edit profile link.
Also, keep in mind that the image is being generated by the Gravatar attached the user’s
email. If you do not have a Gravatar you can go to Gravatar.com and get an account.
This will not only allow you to have a picture display on your dashboard, but you will have
an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things
like comment or post on a blog. The WordPress logo reveals links to the WordPress.org
homepage, The WordPress documentation, the support forums, and a feedback page.
The “About WordPress” link takes you to a page that explains the changes in the current
version of WordPress that you’re using. You might want to take a minute and browse
through this page so you can see what is new with your installation.
The “add new” tab, gives you easy access to adding a new post, media, link, page or
user. We will talk about all these individually in following videos.
The comments tab will take you to the comments page where you can manage all the comments
on your website. Remember, the admin bar is only visible to
logged in users, but if you would like to disable this feature you can do so in your
user profile. Hovering over your name in the admin bar,
and selecting “edit my profile” will give you access to your profile settings.
You can also get to the profile settings from any page in your dashboard by selecting the
“your profile” link in the “users” drop down menu.
From this page you can uncheck the box that reads “Show toolbar when viewing site”
to disable the admin bar. This is not a global option, if you have multiple
users you will have to disable it on all the user profiles.
Click on update profile to save any changes you’ve made.
The admin bar also warns you when you have updates to any plugins, themes, and even WordPress
itself. The warning comes as two arrows going in a
circle, with a number indicating the number of items you need to update. You can click
on this tab to update your items, or you can click on the “Updates” sub-menu tab under
“Dashboard” in the main navigation. In this example you’ll see that I have to
update two of my themes. The Twenty Ten theme, and The Twenty Eleven theme.
The Twenty Eleven Theme is the theme that we’re using for this video series.
On the far left side of the screen you will see “The Main Navigation Menu”, which
contains links to all of WordPress’ administrative functions.
Hovering over any item will reveal sub menu items.
Clicking on the “collapse menu” link, at the bottom of the main navigation, will
minimize the entire menu bar, only displaying the icons for each item.
Click on the “collapse menu” icon again to bring the menu titles back.
The “Work Area” is in the center of page and it displays modules that inform you or
give you quick access to other administrative operations of your website.
The “Right Now” module gives you the most current information about your website, such
as the number of post you currently have published, the total number of comments in your website,
the theme being used, and the WordPress version your site is currently running.
The “Recent Comments” module allows you to see and moderate the most recent comments.
You can hover over an individual comment and approve, reply, edit, mark it as spam, or
delete it directly from this module. The “Quick Press” module allows you to
quickly create new posts directly from the Dashboard by simply entering a title and adding
content. In this module you can also insert images,
video and other files you like by clicking on the upload media icon.
You can also add “tags” which are similar to keywords; they describe the content on
your website, and make it easy for your users to find similar content.
You can save your draft, or publish the post to your website by clicking on the blue button
labeled “Publish.” Don’t worry if I’m going too fast, we
will cover posts, and adding media in a later video.
The “Recent Drafts” Module will display your most recent posts which you have started
but have not published. Any of the modules in the work area can be
collapsed simply by hovering over the title of the module and clicking on the down pointing
arrow, or by simply clicking on the title bar itself.
Clicking on the arrow again will expand the module.
Some modules contain extra options that further customize your WordPress workflow.
To access these extra options hover over the title of a module and click on “configure.”
If the configure link does not appear, then there are no extra options for that particular
module. The “Most Recent RSS” feed show the most
recent posts by the WordPress official blog. This feed can be changed to any other RSS
feed that you like by hovering over the title and clicking on “configure.”
You can try adding a new RSS feed by entering the URL feed on the first input box.
For example you can add our feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarketingUnfolded and then adding Marketing Unfolded, to the
feed title input box. You can set the number of post you want to
display, and you can select the different options about your feed to display.
Once you have entered all the information, click on “submit” to update your module.
And now you can see that the RSS feed shows the most recent posts for MarketingUnfolded.com
You can further customize the look of you work area by enabling or disabling modules.
You can do this by clicking on the “screen options” on the admin bar, and checking
or unchecking the box next to the name of each module.
Notice that when I click on the checkbox the module appears and reapers.
You can also change the number of columns in which to display the modules.
I like the 2-column view but feel free to change it to anything else works better for
you. To re-arrange the modules on your work area,
hover your cursor over the title of any module, until your cursor changes into a 4-way arrow,
this lets you know that the module can be moved.
Click and drag the module to a new location on the page. Release your module when you
see a dotted out line in the space where you want to place the module.
Feel free to change any screen options that you like and move modules around to better
suit your workflow. This wraps up this video, In the next video
we’ll be talking about creating and editing posts.