Using the WordPress toolbar

- To round up our preliminary tour of WordPress, let's take a closer look at the Toolbar. The WordPress Toolbar is, in my opinion, one of the most useful and most under appreciated features in the application and it's one I want to make sure you know how to use because it'll make your life a lot easier once we get going. The WordPress Toolbar works on a simple premise: give the use the user the contextual tools they need, when they need them. What does that mean? Let me show you. You'll first encounter the WordPress Toolbar at the very top of the page when you log in to the admin panel.

If you scroll up and down, you'll see it sticks to the top of the screen and it'll continue to do so for as long as you're logged into the site, both in the back-end and on the front-end. In the Dashboard view, the Toolbar only gives you the most basic options. From the left, you have the WordPress logo that opens up the drop-down that gives you information about WordPress itself and some other useful links. Then, you have the site name, which when clicked, leads you to the front-end. Next, you have your comments moderation count, telling you how many comments are currently held for moderation, followed by the New button, which when hovered, allows you to create a new post, a new media item, a new page, or a new user.

If you have any pending updates to WordPress itself or one of the themes or plugins, a conditional button will appear here in the top left-hand corner, showing you how many updates are pending. On the far right, you have the text "Howdy," followed by your name and a dummy avatar, although later on in the course, we'll work on your profile and customize this information. Hovering over your name gives you direct access to the profile editor for your own profile, as well as the all important Log Out function. To see why the Toolbar is so powerful, let's go to the front-end of the site by going over to the Toolbar and clicking the site name.

On the home page, the Toolbar looks slightly different and its functions have also changed. Clicking the site name will take you to the back-end and then back to the front-end. If you hover over the site name, you see you now have more navigation options. You can go to the Dashboard or you can manage your themes, widgets, and custom menus. There's also a separate button for the customizer, which I've dedicated an entire chapter to, later on in the course. If we navigate to a post or a page, a new edit button appears right up here.

This button will appear on any page, post, or index that has an editable section on the back-end and it allows you to quickly switch between the front-end and the back-end views. In a post, you can now click Edit to edit that specific post and if you click on the complimentary View Post button on the Toolbar in the back-end, you're taken back to the front-end. This is, in my opinion, the most useful tool in the Toolbar because you can use it to get direct access to anything you want to edit instantly.

Personally, when I want to edit or otherwise moderate a post or page, I find it on the front-end of my site and then click Edit, rather than go through the back-end and then scroll through all the posts and the index. You can try this for yourself and see if this process works for you as well. One last thing about the Toolbar: as you start adding plugins to extend the functionality of WordPress, some of these plugins may add features to the Toolbar. If and when that happens, you should always test out the feature immediately to know what it does. More often than not, the plugin will have a setting to turn that Toolbar button off if you don't want to see it all the time.