Room to move with WordPress

Transcript for “Room to move with WordPress.”

Hi, this is Paul Kaiser for WordPressCity.com. Today we’re going to talk about making room to move with WordPress.

Need for a user-friendly work area

The WordPress ‘Dashboard’ is where we do a lot of the work of maintaining and adding to a WordPress website. It really needs to be user-friendly so we can get our work done efficiently. The dashboard’s gone through a lot of changes over the years, and now it’s in pretty good shape.

Need for personal customizations

Many people don’t realize, though, that you can customize the dashboard to your specific needs. I do a lot of blogging from a netbook — there’s just not that much screen space to work with.

Collapsible sidebar

Recently I noticed in this left sidebar if I click that arrow, it collapses the sidebar horizontally, giving you a lot of space for the rest of the things you need on your screen. Each one of these icons, if I scroll over, pops out a menu — giving me access to all the tools I had before, while saving a lot of space. You can click this arrow to make it pop back out if you want.

Zip-up blocks

For me, a lot of these blocks on the dashboard seem to take up a lot of space when I don’t really need them all the time. You can easily click the little arrow in the title bar to zip these up. They’re still available quickly, but they take up a lot less room — leaving you room for the items that you really do care about.

Put things where you want them

What you can also do is click-and-drag these blocks to put them — perhaps — in a spot more useful to you on the dashboard.

Declutter: get rid of things you don’t need

Sometimes, there are blocks on the dashboard that you just don’t use at all, so they’re in your way, taking up valuable space. For instace, ‘Other WordPress News,’ ‘WordPress Development Blog,’ and ‘Plugins’ — those are items I check anyway, and I don’t need them on my dashboard in the way. If you go to ‘Screen Options,’ you’ll see those items listed here — all the blocks. I can check off ‘Other WordPress News,’ ‘wordPress Development Blog,’ and ‘Plugins,’ then close ‘Screen Options.’ You’ll see those blocks are now hidden, and my dashboard is a much neater place.

Showing off with big screens

Sometimes, you have a lot of screen real estate, and you really want to air things out. Clean ‘Screen Options’ and you can go to ‘Number of Columns.’ You can go up to 4. I’m going to show you what happens when you go from 2 columns in the main area to 3. Right away you can see the change. It’s added a third column to the right. Now I have to decide what to put there. Click-and-drag items that you want to move to make things set up the way you need it.

Different tools for different needs

Your dashboard shows different blocks, depending on what section you are in. Here’s the main dashboard, but if I go to ‘Posts > Add New,’ I have a different set of blocks that has all to do with adding Posts. The same thing applies in ‘Screen Options,’ though. All those blocks show up here, and I can turn them on or turn them off. I can also change the number of columns. Also, I can still drag-and-drop items, zip them up, or zip them down to make the best use of my space.

Changes long remembered

You might wonder if all these customizations to the dashboard will still be here the next time you come to use WordPress. Thankfully, WordPress saves all these customizations in your username. So, even if you come back tomorrow on a different computer to do something in WordPress, as long as you use the same login all of your customizations will be there. I hope this little tutorial has helped you get the most out of your WordPress dashboard. For now, I’m going to zip things up and get out of here. Take care.