WordPress 101: Dashboard basics

My Word(press)! Is it Monday already? Then it must be time for the next installment of our WordPress tutorial series “WordPress 101″, the special series of articles helping you, the beginner blogger, set up your first self-hosted WordPress site! This week, let’s kick* a ball around the WordPress equivalent of the back yard and learn all about the Dashboard.

But first, we need to tidy up a couple of loose ends left over from last week’s WordPress 101: Installation article. This is important, so please pay attention! :-)

Do this: Cleaning up the Install

Hopefully all went well with your WordPress installation and you have a lovely, shiny new site ready for action. However, before we can forget all about installation and get on with the really fun stuff, we need to do the following to help keep our new site safe from nasty hacker types…

Open up your FTP client, and delete (yes, I said DELETE) these two files from your WP installation:

../wp-admin/install.php
../wp-admin/upgrade.php

You don’t need them anymore (any subsequent upgrade of Wordpress will automatically load new versions), and you don’t need them lying around where they could be misused by hackers (unlikely, but you never know).

Do this: Change your admin password

Unless you have the memory power of a super-computer it is unlikely that you will remember the admin password created for you during the WordPress installation. So let’s change it!

Login to your WordPress site in your favourite web browser using the username admin and the password provided to you by WordPress during installation. You did write down that password, didn’t you? For future reference it’s a good idea to bookmark the link to the login screen which, typically, will be:

http://mydomain.com/wp-login.php

Look for the menu item called “Users”, click on it and you should see this:

Click on the User admin and you will see the profile page for the admin user. Change the password to something “strong”, ie a mix of letters, numbers and characters, but memorable. Once finished, click Save and your new password will be set.

Ok. All done? Let’s get on with this week’s tutorial!

The Dashboard

Think of this as the nerve-centre of your site. The Dashboard is where you access all of Wordpress’ administrative tasks, be it writing/editing posts, managing plugins, approving comments, or even editing your template theme files. You will be spending a lot of time working in the Dashboard, and although it won’t be long before you can zoom around it like an expert, as it’s still all new to you (and perhaps a little daunting), let’s take a quick look around and see what’s what.

So, login to your Dashboard using your admin username and (new) password. You should see something like this:

I am not going to go into detail describing every single menu item, for two simple reasons. Firstly, “doing something” is often better than “reading about something”, so take a look around, open up some menu items and see what’s there. Don’t worry, you won’t break anything - just don’t click “Save” or “Update” or “Delete” unless you mean it! Secondly, a brand new version of WordPress, version 2.7, is just about to be released. Whilst the basic functionality and organization of the new-look Dashboard is very similar to today’s version, the layout and look and feel of the Dashboard is radically different. No doubt this will be the subject of a future WordPress 101 article.

Here’s a brief run-down of the key menu items:

Write

This is where you write new Posts and Pages. You can also create new Links here, for example for your “blogroll”, should you choose to have one. We’ll look at the differences between Posts and Pages in more detail in a later instalment of this series.

Manage

This is an important section of the Dashboard and you will spend a fair amount of time here once your site has some content. Basically speaking, this is where you edit content you have already added via the Write menu. Editing Posts, Pages, Links, Tags and so on, is all handled here.

Additionally, the Manage menu gives you access to two important features - though perhaps not used very frequently - and these are Import and Export, very useful tools which enable you to download or upload a copy of your database in XML format. Don’t worry too much about what “XML” means, other than it is a way of formatting data by organizing it into a text document using XML markup, not dissimilar to HTML, so that it can be easily “read” by software that understands XML, for example your web browser or text editor. Import and Export are very useful because they enable us to move the contents of one WordPress database to another WordPress site, or even import the contents of a database from another blogging platform such as Blogger, Typepad, etc.

Design

The Design menu is where you select the Theme to be used by your site. Upon installation, WordPress loads 2 basic themes but it is unlikely that you will want to use one of these given the vast number of Themes available, generally free to download and use. This section of the Dashboard also gives you access to setting up and displaying Widgets and, depending on the current Theme being used, access to any Theme Options that may be available.

Wotsa Widget? A Widget is a small predefined piece of code that you can easily configure and add to your theme sidebar, for example. They are very user-friendly, generally self-explanatory to configure, and enable you to add many of the typical things found in a sidebar: category lists, recent posts, calendars and more.

Comments

Comments are postings made by visitors to your site in response to the articles you have written and published on your site. This section of the Dashboard is where you manage comments, specifically whether to “approve” them or not, or mark them as spam.

Sadly, comment spam is inevitable. You will receive comment spam. End of story. For example, at the time of writing, this very site has already received almost 2000 spam comments since its re-design a few months ago. Luckily, WordPress provides an excellent anti-spam system called Akismet, a plugin automatically installed with WordPress and which is, generally, very good at catching comment spam. We’ll look more closely at this in a future article.

Settings

As you can see, the Settings menu gives access to several sub menus, all of which control various aspects of the configuration of your WordPress installation. As a rule, you will set these up once and then forget about them. The default Settings are perfectly fine for the moment and, for now, I recommend that you leave them as they are. Again, we shall come back to this in a future installment of this series and adjust some of the settings to fit specific site requirements.

Plugins

Plugins are an essential part of any WordPress installation. Whilst the basic WordPress installation provides most of the functionality we need to run our site, Plugins provide additional functionality or make an existing process easier to use. I shall be devoting an entire article to Plugins. Yes, they are that important. In the meantime (and in a shameless plug) I’ve assembled a brief list of what I consider to be “essential” plugins, which you can see here.

Coming up next…

In next weeks’ WordPress 101 article I shall be running through some important Dashboard Settings and explaining what they mean and how to use them.

Until then… Happy web developing!

This article is syndicated from Studiograsshopper.

Footnote: * That’s what we do with footballs’ in my part of the world. :-)