It’s good to familiarize yourself with the Admin Dashboard and in a detailed manner. It’s important to know more about all the links you click on when scrolling about your “wp-admin.” Let’s take a look at a great link that will explain it all for you. Bookmark this link and read through it to learn more:
The Administration Screen provides access to the control features of your WordPress installation. Each Administration Screen is presented in sections, the Admin Bar, the header, the main navigation, the work area, and the footer. The Admin Bar, with links to various admininstration functions, is displayed at the top of each Administration Screen if a user has elected to Show Admin Bar in their Profile screen. The top portion of all Screens, the header, is featured in light shading. The header shows the name of your blog as a link to your blog’s main page, and a “Howdy, user” pull-down menu with links to your profile (shown as your user name), and Log Out. Just below the top shaded area are two hanging tabs, Screen Options and contextual Help, that can be clicked to expand them.
On the left side of the screen is the main navigation menu detailing each of the administrative functions you can perform. At the bottom of that section is a Collapse menu button to collapse the main navigation area to a set of icons, or to expand (fly-out) to show an icon and description for each major administrative function. Within each major function, such as Posts, a pull-down arrow is presented upon hovering mouse hovers over the title area. A click of that arrow expands the menu to display each of the sub-menu choices. Clicking that arrow again collapses the sub-menu.
The large area in the middle of the screen is the work area. It is here the specific information relating to a particular navigation choice, such as adding a new post, is presented and collected…….Learn More
Learning WordPress
Whether you’re a WordPress.com veteran or blogging newbie, the updated version of Learn WordPress.com is sure to teach you something that you don’t already know……Learn More
More Useful Plugins:
Spammer Blocker:
If you are tired of blocking spammers’ IP addresses manually, you can use this plugin. It blocks all visitors who posted a comment that was later marked as spam. After activation of this plugin all authors of spam comments will be banned immediately.
Features
- Advanced tools for managing banned IP addresses
- Simple tool for importing and exporting records
- Configurable banned message
- Two ways to detect spammers……Learn More
WordPress FireWall 2:
This WordPress plugin monitors web requests to identify and stop the most obvious attacks.
This is an updated version of the popular WordPress Firewall plugin, with fixes for all known bugs and a few new features!
This WordPress plugin investigates web requests with simple, WordPress-specific heuristics, to identify and stop the most obvious attacks. There are a few powerful, generic modules that do this; but they’re not always installed on web servers, and usually difficult to configure.
This plugin intelligently whitelists and blacklists pathological-looking phrases, based on which field they appear within, in a page request (unknown/numeric parameters vs. known post bodies, comment bodies, etc.). Its purpose is not to replace prompt and responsible upgrading, but rather to mitigate 0-day attacks and let bloggers sleep better at night……Learn More
YSlider:
YSlider automatically displays the first image inside the post or page for each item in the widget and takes care to adapt it to the right width size for the main image and to generate the relative thumbnail in the carousel.
YSlider can display the post excerpt as item content. If the excerpt is not present it also creates for each post a teaser of the text to be visualized from the first 55 words! (To visualize the post excerpt go to posts > edit > screen options > excerpt)……Learn More
User Activation Email:
Require users to enter an activation code to access the site the first time. The activation code is emailed upon user registration.
Adds an activation code to the new user email sent once a user registers. The user must enter this activation code in addition to a username and password to log in successfully the first time. A 10 character activation code is added to the user meta when the user is registered….Learn More
