The WordPress Dashboard for WP Beginners

According to the WordPress,

The Dashboard is a tool to quickly access the most used areas of your blog’s Administration and to provide glimpses into other areas of the WordPress community. The Dashboard Screen presents information in blocks called modules. WordPress delivers eight modules: Right Now, Recent Comments, Incoming Links, Plugins,QuickPress, Recent Drafts, WordPress Blog, and Other WordPress News.

The first screen you see when you log into the administration area of your blog is your Dashboard. The main idea of the dashboard is to give you a place where you can get an at-a-glance overview of what’s happening with your blog. You can catch up on news, view your draft posts, see who’s linking to you or how popular your content’s been, quickly put out a no-frills post, or check out and moderate your latest comments.

The Dashboard acts like a cockpit with all the controls and switches you need to help your website function the way you want it to. This might seem basic to those who have been using WordPress for quite some time now but there are still quite a few out there who are still struggling to figure out how to find their way through the backend, scared to death lest they “break” their website beyond repair.

Getting to know your WordPress Dashboard

If you are a WordPress beginner, the Admin Section or backend can be quite intimidating at first, but once you become familiar with the different sections, everything will make sense. What do you see after you successfully login to your WordPress website? Here’s what you can expect.

The Dashboard contains the following default modules. These modules can be dragged, dropped, repositioned, or toggled on and off according to your preferences.

Right Now

This module, at its basic, gives you a concise overview of your what’s going on with your site. It contains information and stats about your content (posts, pages, categories, tags), discussions (approved, pending, or spam comments), the name of your WordPress theme and the number of active widgets you are using, users online, and the WordPress version installed. More information can be included in this module depending on any additional plugins you install. You can also customize your Privacy Settings if you wish to keep your site private.

QuickPress

This module is the best and quickest way you can create a simple post. You can add a title, content, media files, custom forms, tags, and save your post as a draft or publish immediately. It’s a great tool for capturing and publishing ideas without going through the “Add New Post” module.

Recent Comments

If you allow comments on your website, this module helps you moderate the discussions on your posts. You can approve (unapprove), edit, reply, mark as spam, or delete comments right on the dashboard.

Recent Drafts

This module displays saved drafts of posts and pages that you are working on which still needs to be edited or published.

Incoming Links

This module reveals the urls of other websites that has linked to your WordPress website. You may or may not find this module useful as it does not always include all the websites that link to you. You can also configure incoming links you allow by editing the RSS feed information ( url, number of items to display, item date).

What’s Hot

This module displays recent posts from the official WordPress Blog, Other WordPress News, Popular or Latest Posts from around WordPress. This keeps you updated on the latest WordPress related news such as version announcements, security notices, and general WordPress community posts and updates.

Plugins

This module lists the Most Popular, Newest, and Recently Updated plugins available. If you are adventurous and you want to experiment with how different plugins work on your site, this is the perfect resource to find plugins to play with.

Site Stats

This module is probably the one you need to pay most attention to. It shows you a graph of your website’s activities – views, visitors, traffic – per day, week, or month. It’s a great tool to find out how many visits you get, what your top posts are, top searches on your website, and overall statistics to help you improve, maintain, and optimize your site even further.

Knowing the functions of each of these modules will help you learn how to use them to manage your website. Take some time to go through each one of these modules and familiarize yourself with each of them. You’ll soon be mastering all of them and it’ll be instinctive later on.

WordPress 3.5 – New Features to be excited about in 2013

Drumroll please, Elvin Jones is in the house! WordPress house, that is. In keeping with WordPress code naming tradition, the latest WordPress update released – WordPress 3.5 has been named “Elvin” in honor of drummer Elvin Jones, and there is a lot to drum about.

Here are some of the new features that have been updated in WordPress 3.5:

New Media Manager

The Drag and Drop feature is streamlined, fast and easy to use. Creating galleries is faster with inline caption editing capabilities and simplified controls. Insert multiple images at once with Shift/Ctrl+click or insert multiple galleries per post and independently order images as you like.

New Default Theme

Twenty Twelve (2012) theme for WordPress is a simple, flexible and elegant theme with a gorgeous open sans typeface. It is currently the default theme for WordPress 3.5. It is mobile friendly, fully responsive and looks great on any device. This theme includes all the latest theme features including a front-page template with its own widgets which you can customize and also set up as a single page.

Favorite Plugin Support

Mark all your favorite or often used plugins in the WordPress Plugin Direcotry and access all of them directly in the Admin Panel>Plugins> Install Plugins page using your WordPress.org user name. This pulls out all your favorite go to plugins and saves a lot of time especially when you are setting up multiple sites.

Admin Enhancements

WordPress 3.5 sports a new Welcome Screen, simpler and easier to use even by WordPress beginners. All the basic tasks are accessible in this new interface – from Getting Started to Writing your First Blog Post to Managing Widgets – user-friendly indeed.

Retina display support

WordPress 3.5 is also Retina-Ready (HiDPI) where many visual elements have been updated and converted to CSS3 elements to support the new displays so that they look good on these higher resolution screens.

Support for Instagram, oEmbed support for SoundCloud and Slideshare

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly. Great news for Instagram, Soundcloud and Slideshare users as WordPress 3.5 supports these services and it is now easier to integrate them to your site without touching any code.

Link Manager Gone

And its absence will hardly be felt probably. WordPress 3.5 hides the Link Manager by default for new installs but if you truly miss it, this feature can still be enabled via the Link Manager plugin. All sites with existing links are left as is.

XML-RPC is enabled by default

This means better accessibility for screen readers, touch devices, and keyboard users. This feature is also for remote publishing/mobile and easier connection with mobile apps like the Official WordPress iOS app. Those who are using Atom will need to use a 3rd party plugin.

New Tumblr importer

If you’ve been wanting to import your Tumblr content into WordPress for years now is the time to do so. WordPress 3.5 has now made this possible.

Multisites can now be installed and used in the subdirectory

Another improvement in WordPress 3.5 which multisite developers will appreciate is the ability to install WordPress Multisite in the subdirectory and not in the document root.

There’s more under the hood goodness that can be further explored if you want to. Some people wait a while before they install the latest WordPress update to give plugin developers time to update their own plugins. Make sure to backup your files before you do any updates.

WordPress Plugins 2013: Trends

WordPress themes, free or premium, come with common, basic features and functionalities upon installation. Some are built in together with the WordPress version you are using while others come with the theme you plan to use and install. Technically, these plugins are a set of one or more functions, written in the PHP scripting language, that adds a specific set of features or services to the WordPress weblog. Simply put, these plugins offer new additions to your blog that either enhance features that were already available or add otherwise unavailable new features to your site. Here are some of what we think will be the WordPress Plugin Trends for 2013:

Jetpack Plugin

The JetPack plugin supercharges your self?hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com. You can activate this plugin if you have an existing blog on WordPress.com. Once connected and activated, several awesome features available on WordPress.com like: Contact Form, Gravatar Hovercards, Shortcode Embeds, Spelling and Grammar, and many others become available to your self-hosted site. All this is powered by WordPress.com’s cloud infrastructure.

WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

This popular plugin designed and developed by WordPress Consultant Joost De Valk. WordPress SEO is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between. It has recently been updated and is now compatible with WordPress 3.5.

ALO EasyMail Newsletter

One of the best ways to connect to your market is to get them to subscribe to your newsletter via email. It is also one of the most tedious things to do if you do not have an ARS (auto responder system) provider who will automatically distribute your newsletter. ALO EasyMail Newsletter is a great email marketing marketing tool that allows you to gather and manage subscribers and write and send newsletters right within WordPress. It also supports internationalization and multi language requirements.

WP Smush.it

Improving your page ranking is not just about having the right keywords. Fast loading pages are now part of the equation. WP Smush.it is a plugin that offers an API that performs image optimizations like optimizing JPEG compression and converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs automatically to help improve site performance. As sites continue to become more image intensive, plugins like this are helpful in managing load rate.

Photonic Gallery for Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, 500px and Instagram

Social networking has branched out into different streams and has integrated images into its arsenal. Hence the popularity of Pinterest and Instagram. Photonic takes all that and lets you use the WordPress gallery shortcode and ramps it up with a lot of added functionality including glamming up your social networking images like Instagram. It supports Flickr photos, Photo sets, Galleries and Collections, along with Picasa photos and albums, SmugMug albums and images, 500px photos and collections, and Instagram photos and users. You can also enable authentication for your site visitors that will let them see private and protected photos from each provider.

WordPress 3.5 has been released so some of these plugins may need to be updated to work with the latest WordPress update. Please check the developers’ links to see of they have a version compatible with the latest update.

20 Useful Admin Plug-ins for WordPress

Do you know what makes WordPress the number one choice amongst bloggers? Although one can list many reasons but one of the most prominent in the list will be the number of plug-ins it supports. WordPress currently runs more than 20,000 plug-ins that have been downloaded more than 30 chore times! This is both good and bad news. Good news because you will have a lot to choose from. You will almost every time find what you need. Bad news because amongst such a vast ocean of plug-ins it is easy to get lost and drowned in the information overload. To help you out we present you with 20 WordPress admin plug-ins that we feel are the best in their niche. As the name suggests these are admin plug-ins i.e. they will help the administrator of the WordPress blog to operate the blog in a better and more efficient way.

For example, let’s say that you are fed up with all the clutter of the unnecessary and superfluous windows and bars that occupy your WordPress dashboard. Try Ad minimize, listed in the first position below. This plug-in allows you to compress windows to allow more content to be substituted in its place. Obviously different people have different priorities. So with Ad minimize you can customize your WordPress’s dashboard the way you like.

Besides Ad minimize, there are 19 other useful plug-ins that, I think, you should know of. Scroll down and check them out.

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10 Inspirational Typography Plugins for WordPress

Believe it or not – typography or the way you present your text and media on your website – plays a crucial role in building your brand name. Did you know? There are books comprising thousands of pages that teach you how to use a consistent typographical style on your publications. Such as well as “Style Guides” like The Chicago Manual of Style, The MLA Style Manual, Hart’s Rules or The Oxford Guide to Style, etc. Different organizations use different style guides and apply them on their publications in order to achieve consistency throughout the text. If a person who has been reading The Guardian for several months will be asked to identify the paper amongst a collection of many other papers such that the name of the publication is hidden from view, he will have little or no difficulty in identifying it. This is because The Guardian, just like all other standard newspapers, use a specific set of fonts, a specific indentation, a specific line gap, etc. in its publications. Such things help create an authority and reinforce the brand name.

It is not necessary that you follow the standard guides for your publication. If you want you can create your own set of style rules or mix some of your own personal tastes with any standard style manual. Whatever you decide, to help you in your endeavor I present you with 10 inspirational typography plug-ins for WordPress. Some are free while some others cost a nominal amount.

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The Beginner’s Guide to Learn Almost Everything About WordPress

So you’ve been blogging for quite sometime now and you’ve been posting random personal and business stuff on one of those free hosted sites. Everything has been going on well so far until one day this free hosted site suddenly announces that it is shutting down and all your content including all your contacts, posts and thousands of images will no longer be available after a certain date. Horrors! You now scramble to download every last post you’ve made and backup all your data before the clock strikes twelve or else everything disappears forever. Have you ever had that happen to you?

And then you stumbled upon WordPress. The thing is you know very little about it and so you start googling about it which is also probably why you ended up here and you are now reading this post. You want to know more.

Below are some useful resources to help jumpstart your WordPress journey. These resources are mainly aimed towards the novice or beginner level so WordPress savvy professionals might find some of these a bit elementary. Nevertheless, these references can someday come in handy whether you are a beginner or a true blue WordPress guru. We would also like to ask our readers to join the conversation by leaving a comment, any helpful suggestions or additional resources to add to our list.

For those who are about to begin their WordPress journey, check out these resources we have compiled to help you get started:

Websites to Bookmark

  • WordPress.com – A blog web hosting service (free) powered by the open source WordPress software. A good starting point on how to learn the how WordPress actually works at the backend and also to familiarize yourself with running a WordPress site. You can always upgrade to Premium status once you know your way.
  • wpmu.org – The number one source for WordPress news, tips, plugins, and theme reviews.
  • WPBeginner.com – A WordPress resource site providing quality tips, tricks, hacks and other resources for the WordPress community.
  • Speckyboy.com – Web design magazine that offers tutorials, time-saving techniques, inspiration, and useful resources for the web including WordPress.
  • wp.tutsplus.com – A site dedicated to teaching people how to use WordPress, develop widgets, plugins and themes.

Books to Read

Channels/Videos to Watch

  • WordPress.tv – A visual resource for all things WordPress including tutorials, updates, and the latest news.
  • WordCamp.tv – Presentations, highlights, and behind-the-scenes look at WordCamps around the world.
  • Lynda.com – Online courses and tutorials on anything WordPress.
  • StudioPress.tv – Step by step video tutorials for the Genesis Framework for WordPress.
  • Youtube WordPress tutorials

Authors/Developers to Follow

Straight from the Source

  • WordPress.org – the ultimate source for all things WordPress.

There are so many resources out there and so many tutorials that can help you get started. These are just a few to help point you in the right direction.

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