WordPress Dashboard

In this lesson we will look at the components that make up the dashboard of the sites backend. These components are used to manage the sites content, pages and configuration.

Use the buttons below to navigate through the lesson

Right Now
Various stats, such as how many posts, pages and comments do you have on your site? The version of WordPress and the theme you are using.

Recent Comments
If you enable comments on your pages and blog posts, then this will list recent comments and allow you to quickly approve them.

Incoming Links
Sites that are linking to your site?

Quickpress
If your website is a blog, you can quickly add a post here.

Recent Drafts
If you’ve been working on posts or pages, you can quickly return to recent draft versions.

WordPress Blog
Information and news from the world of WordPress

Other WordPress News
Further WordPress news.

Plugins
These provide additional features and functionality to your site.

Dashboard Menu
Updates for WordPress, themes and Plugins will appear automatically listed here. We will deal with how to perform updates in a later lesson.

Posts Menu
Displays all posts from here you can add new posts, add categories and tags. Categories and tags can be used to filter searches on your site.

Media Menu
Displays all the media available on your website that is stored in your library.  Media can be images, videos or sounds.

Links Menu
A set of links can displayed on your website and this menu item will display those already created.

Pages Menu
Displays all pages on your site, published or drafts and where you add new pages.

Comments Menu
When you access the list of comments you can see all comments, pending comments (i.e. those not yet live), approved comments, spam and trashed comments.

Appearance Menu
This menu item will be explained in a later lesson, for now just understand that this is used to control the look of the sites front end.

Plugins Menu
Plugins allow you to extend the functionality of WordPress. This will be covered in a later lesson. As with the Upgrades, you are also shown here if there are any upgrades available.

Users Menu
Shows all site users, if you permit people to sign up to your site they will displayed here and their role. From here you can also access From here you can also access Your Profile where you can change your admin password if needed.

Tools Menu
All available tools some plugins may add to this menu.

Settings Menu
Shows all site settings, we will cover most of this in later lessons. From here you can change items for example site title, change from blog to website, whether to allow comments on your site. Change date format and permalink settings.

In the next lesson we will convert WordPress from its default blog format to a website. We will then create a static front page and set this as the sites home page. After this we will remove the default pages and comments turning the site from the default blog format to a website.