The WordPress Dashboard

Posted on | July 10, 2009 | No Comments

After you login the first screen you will see is called the Dashboard:

(click to enlarge)

The Dashboard is the right part of the page, beneath the house icon, that provides quick access to key data on your blog. Each panel has a focus:

Right Now
Summarizes the basic stats of the website. Note that most of these are also links – so if you see that you have 8 categories, and you click that statistic, you’ll be taken to a page where you see the list of current categories, and have the option to add more.

Recent Comments
…list exactly that. This will show the most recent 5 comments throughout your site – not necessarily on the most recent post. This can be very useful to quickly see who you need to respond to.

Incoming Links
One of the nifty things that WordPress does for you is track the number of links coming TO your blog from OTHER blogs. This isn’t an exhaustive list – just the ones that Google Blog Search knows about. The more links to your blog the higher it’ll be ranked in search engines.

QuickPress
This is a super-quick way for you to write a post – just fill out the title, type a quick post (there is no editor, so you’ll have to make do with plain text!), add a couple of tags to

Recent Drafts
One of the great things about Content Management Systems (CMS’s for short) is that it’s a great place to get your materials ready. Even if you don’t want to make a post or a page live, you can gather the information and write a first draft, then have a friend or a coworker proof-read it or give you suggestions before making it ‘live’. Recent drafts is a quick list of the most recently created (but not yet published) posts.

You can add more tools the dashboard, and we will review those in later posts, but this is the most basic set of information that you’ll find really useful on your dashboard.

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