Using the WordPress admin panel

- When you log into your WordPress site for the first time, you're met with a Dashboard, which is the landing view for the WordPress Admin Panel. This view provides you with a quick welcome message at the top to get you started, that you can dismiss if you don't want to see it, followed by an overview of your own site and some more or less useful external links. If this is the first time you're logging in, you'll see that, like my sites, there really isn't much on this view yet. As we move forward with the course, you'll see more information up here including Post and Page counts up here, and Comment moderation and other things.

The WordPress Admin Panel consists of three main components: the WordPress toolbar that you can see at the top here, which we'll talk about in the next movie, the Admin menu, positioned to the left, and the main Admin area, which is where we'll do the majority of our work. The Admin menu is separated into 3 main sections: the Dashboard section, where you access the Dashboard application updates, and some plugin activated features, like statistics. The Content Management section, where you can create and manage Posts Pages, Media items, Comments and other plugin activated features, like form submissions, and finally, the Site Administration section, where you can configure among other things, the appearance of your site, what plugins are installed and activated, the overall settings, and plugin activated extensions like SEO Social sharing and security.

When you hover over each of the available buttons, you'll see many of them have further fly-out menus with more options. Once a main menu item is selected, say Appearance, these options become available in the menu under that option. You'll also notice a Collapse menu button at the bottom of the Admin menu, which allows you to hide or show the main menu to provide more space when you work.

The menu is also fully responsive, meaning on smaller screens, it first collapses to the left, and then moves up to the top behind a hamburger icon to remain accessible on all types of devices. As you've already seen, the main Admin area view changes depending on what items you choose from the Admin menu. Throughout this course, we will be going through most of these views in detail, so for now I'll just draw your attention to the customized station options that are available here. Each of the main Admin area views consist of a series of panels, typically laid out in a two-column grid.

This layout is fully customizable for each user on the site. You can collapse any of the panels by clicking the toggle in the top right hand corner, and you can also move the panels around by simply dragging and dropping them to new locations. More importantly, each of these panels can be toggled on and off using the Screen Options feature found in the top right hand corner. When you open the Screen Options panel, you'll see a list of all the available panels for the specific view you are on, and you can toggle each of them on or off to your liking.

This also means that if you're seeing something on my screen that is not visible on your screen, the first place to look is under Screen Options. Chances are, it's just hidden in your view. In some cases, you'll find useful features that are hidden by default under this view. I'll draw your attention to a couple of these later in the course. Finally, in the top right hand corner of every view, there is a Help button that brings down contextual help for whatever view you're currently on. This is where you'll find quick answers to your questions, as well as links to further reading, either in the WordPress Codex, the WordPress handbooks, or in the WordPress Support Forums.