In this video, I’m going to show you how to customize your WordPress dashboard.
[evp width=”640″ height=”480″]tutorials/wpvideos/wp-customize-dashboard.swf[/evp]
Now, the first thing you need to do is log in to your WordPress dashboard, and perhaps the easiest way to move things around, to move some of these modules around in your WordPress blog, is to simply click on the module that you wanna move, and hold down your mouse button and just drag it here – all right? Until you see this little box appear, and then just release this module here. So now, you have instantly rearranged the order of some of the modules. And as you may have noticed, that there’s always a small toggle button in here – a small arrow that you can click, to minimize or maximize most of these modules in WordPress, and that will make it even easier for you to move things around.
So for example, if the most important thing I want to see is the recent comments on my blog, then I can just click this, drag, and release it right on top here. And then I can just expand this. Okay? So this simple drag-and-drop function appears in all WordPress pages, and you can use it for literally any function or in WordPress, for example, in your post-editing screen or on your comments screen. You can always just drag-and-drop some of the elements around to arrange the order that you find perhaps is the most suitable for you.
Now, the other way to customize your WordPress dashboard is to click on the Screen Options tab that you see above, and again, this Screen Options tab will appear on any WordPress page or function that you want to access. So you just click on that to expand the options, and you can see here, WordPress allows me to select exactly what I want to show on my WordPress screen. So if I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to use the QuickPress option, I can just uncheck this, and you can see that it starts to disappear from your WordPress dashboard. So I’m gonna uncheck WordPress News, and I’m also going to uncheck WordPress Development Blog, Right Now, etc.
And you can see in this section here now, the amount of modules has reduced significantly, and you can also select to show all your content in just one column, and you can see that this has changed; two columns, three columns, or even four columns.
But I think for most cases, you’d be quite satisfied to just use the one-column or two-column settings. And again, if you have chosen two columns, then you can just drag this around to rearrange the order of things; to make it easier for you to access some of these functions, and then just click these screen options to minimize the screen options screen.
So as I mentioned, you can do your customizations on any WordPress function or any WordPress page. So I’m gonna show you how to edit or to customize your dashboard for the post-editing page. So I’m just gonna click on “Edit†to see all the posts in this particular WordPress blog, and as you can see, there aren’t too many posts ‘cause this is just an example blog. And I’m gonna click through to the default “Hello world!†post. All right. So this is my post-editing page. And as I told you before, you can just minimize a lot of these functions here. You can also minimize any of the functions that you see below. All right? And you can always drag-and-drop to change the order of things. Correct? And you can also drag-and-drop this particular module into another column.
And I’ve just dragged and dropped it here. And again, you can click on Screen Options, and it would now display options that are suitable for your post-editing screen only. So if I do not want to see post excerpts, I can just uncheck this; uncheck trackbacks; post revisions; custom fields; some of these functions in WordPress, you’ll probably never ever use, so to make it easier for you to access your posts and also to make – to clear up some of the clutter in your WordPress screen, you can just disable all these things. And if you prefer a one-column layout, you can just select a one-column layout, and then just click on Screen Options to minimize the screen options tab.
And now, you can see that I’ve changed my entire page to a one-column layout, and I can always continue to edit it and to remove some of the functions I feel are redundant, depending on your style of blogging and what other features that you use the most often.
So that’s how you customize your WordPress dashboard.