WordPress Dashboard Tour

Video Transcript

Now that we have WordPress installed on our server, it’s time to get familiarized with the backend or admin area of our WordPress site, otherwise known as our dashboard area.

To do that, we need to log in. There are a couple of ways we can do that. Up here in the address bar of your browser, type in the URL to your WordPress installation.

In my case we installed it on our root directory. But if you had it installed on a subdirectory, just put that in up here in the address bar, then forward slash, and then wp-login.php. Or in a lot of cases, the default theme that you had installed will include in one of the widget areas an area called the meta box which has a login link. You can just simply click on that, and it brings you to the login page, wp-login.php. Now here is where you enter your username and password that you had added in the installation process. Now I’m going to demonstrate what it looks like if you add the wrong stuff because of that plugin that we had installed during our WordPress installation process called the Loginizer.

This is the incorrect stuff. So if we try to log in, we get this. And this is all customizable which we’re going to cover in greater detail in a future video where we dive deeper into that particular plugin. But just know that if you see this, don’t freak out. Just know that you’ve put in the wrong stuff and you better go hunt it down. So let’s go ahead and enter the right stuff and click on Login. I’m going to close that. And this is that dashboard area I was talking about. Up along the top is the admin toolbar which can only be viewed by the administrator. So anybody else coming to your site, they’re not going to see this. But over here on the left, if we hover over the WordPress icon, you get this drop-down of other WordPress-related stuff like the WordPress support forums, WordPress feedback, WordPress documentation. And feel free to check that out when you get a chance.

Then when you hover over this next icon to the right titled My Blog, it gives you this drop-down where you can click on Visit Site. That will take you right back to where we were a second ago, the homepage. And then to the right of that is a list of all the comments that require your attention. Of course, right now, this being a brand-new site, it’s zero. And then to the right of that, we have this icon titled New. Hovering over that gets us this drop-down where we can click on these to create a new post or add new media or add a new page, a new user, and so on. You can do the same thing over here in the left admin sidebar. Under Post, Add New. Under media, Add New. Under Pages, Add New, and so on. And we’re going to dive deeper into all of these elements in upcoming videos. So just because I’m skimming over these right now, don’t worry.

We’re going to get into those. And then moving across to the far right of this admin toolbar, we have our username. And when you hover over that, you get this drop-down where you can edit your profile stuff like change your password. You can log out from this site here as the administrator. And this image here is the icon or the gravatar associated to your username. And we’ll cover how this can be changed at a later date.

On the Dashboard page itself, we have these different modules. This is the Welcome module, At a Glance, Activity, and so on. Now you can turn these on or off or display or remove them right up here under the screen options tab. Hit that drop-down and you can see all these are checked right now. If we wanted to get rid of the Welcome module, just remove the check mark.

And this Screen Options tab, by the way, is available on each one of these pages you’re going to encounter over here on the left admin sidebar, and it’s specific to that page. So as you can see here, this is just the stuff for the Dashboard page. If we were to go to the Post page and then hit the drop-down for the screen options, you can see this is specific for that Post page. Let’s come back to the Dashboard.

I also want to mention the same thing exists with the Help tab. The Help tab gives you more information related to that particular page. This is help information related to the Dashboard page. You have different help information related to the Post page, if that’s where you’re at, or the Pages page and so on. So definitely check that out whenever you start poking around on these different pages here. Now let’s close this.

And these other elements here, at a glance, activity, you can expand or collapse these with these drop-down arrows to the right of the title bar. And when you hover over the title bar, you get this little four-arrow icon. You can left-click, hold, and drag that and move this around if you’d like. Now if we move over to the left admin sidebar, again, we’re going to cover all of these in their own, individual set of videos, so don’t worry about those right now. I do want to mention though that since we installed and activated that one plugin called Loginizer during the installation process, it added its own Settings tab over here on the left sidebar. A lot of times, whenever you add a new plugin, you’ll either see it over here on the left sidebar or it’ll be stuck amongst one of these other tabs. Usually, it’s the Settings tab. But again, we’re going to cover that in greater detail in upcoming videos.

Just before I close this, I do want to mention that if this is a little much for you and you want more work room over here, you’ve got this Collapse menu button down at the bottom. And there all that is displayed is the icons for those items. And to expand it, just hit that button again.
And that’s going to bring us to the end of our tour of the Dashboard and other areas of the admin section of our WordPress site. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.