Wordpress dashboard is the section that shows up when you just get authenticated into your WordPress website as an admin.

This section of the website is called the dashboard and it is responsible for all the necessary settings for your WordPress website to function perfectly. You have the option for a bunch of customization and that is what this lesson is all about.

This lesson will cover the core settings needed for a good WordPress website to function very well.

The diagram below is a snapshot of the WordPress admin after a fresh installation.

WORDPRESS DASHBOARD GENERAL OVERVIEW

Looking at the WordPress dashboard from the image below the following sections can be easily seen.

1.  Mega-menu: Featuring different navigation options at the top right corner of the dashboard.

2.    User interface: The default interface contains a few wide gates for performing different actions. These wide gates are a result of some plugins shipped together with WordPress for performing a different action. This is called default UI because as you install some other plugins that have the option to add a wide gate to the UI it will also add its wide gate but looking at it this is the default UI.

It contains an option for customizing your WordPress theme, creating a blog post, creating a page, viewing the front end of your website, settings relating to comments, creating a quick draft, and even the section to display some news from wordpress.org.

SETTINGS

This section will take us directly to what we have for this post i.e. setting up the WordPress and customizing all the necessary features needed for the website to have a great look. The first and important setting we will talk about is the admin privileges and related user roles

Setting admin privileges USER ROLES

WordPress has a fairly powerful user management system built-in. There are many different user roles to select from. These roles give your website’s users access to different features in your website’s backend.

The most powerful role is the admin role. The administrator can do anything on the website.

There are no restrictions to the website administrator and because of that, you should always be cautious of whom you permit to handle this role.

Someone with this role could delete your entire site, so make sure you only give administrator access to people you trust or your web developer if they request access.

To manage your users you will need to click users in the left menu in the admin area. Here you can manually add, edit and delete users. You can change their contact info, passwords, names etc.

You won’t generally want to change other user’s info, but you may have to cross-check if the need arises. The most common operations you will be using here will be adding new users and changing their permissions.

If any of your users are not functioning very well you can delete them or give them a warning message thereby making sure that you handle your administrative role perfectly.

ADDING A NEW USER

 To add a new user to your existing admins 

Hover over users

Click add new.

Fill out the required info and save.

To change user permissions in the WordPress admin area

In the user area, click the user’s name you would like to edit.

Where it says role, select the appropriate role.

Scroll down and click update user.

USER ROLE DESCRIPTIONS

Here’s a brief description of each user roles. The complete documentation of user role for WordPress website can be found at WordPress user roles documentation

Administrator – nothing is off-limits to him.

Editor – has access to all posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, and links.

Author – can write, upload photos, edit, and publish all posts.

Contributor – has no publishing or uploading capability, but can write and edit their posts and save as draft.

SHORTCODES

This is an important feature of  WordPress that should never be overlooked. Though some tutorials may not have considered adding it to this kind of post, the admin needs to know about WordPress shortcode.

Wordpress shortcodes is a short form of adding dynamic contents to your pages or post. These contents will now display in full form to your users when they visit a particular post or page. Shortcodes are majorly associated with plugins.

Therefore plugins are the main reason WordPress shortcodes exist. Many plugins will include shortcodes and often it’s only a matter of finding it and copying and pasting the shortcode where you’d like it to display when the page is rendered to your user.

HOW TO PLACE SHORTCODES ON A WEBPAGE

Shortcodes begin and end with square brackets like [].

 Each shortcode will have a name as well like “contactform”.

So the “contactform” shortcode would look like [contactform].

There are an opening and a closing square bracket with the shortcode name inside.

You can include shortcodes in any page or post simply by pasting it in or typing it in.

Spelling errors will cause the shortcode to not work. If the shortcode does not exist it will not do anything either.

To get the shortcode of any plugin simply go locate the plugin in your menu and go to its setting to find it out. You can also read the plugin’s documentation to find out more about it in case you didn’t see it in the settings. Also, know that it's not all plugin that needs to be embedded in a webpage. so some plugins may not have the source code we just talked about

GENERAL SETTING

In this section, we will study General Settings in WordPress. WordPress general setting is used to set the basic configurations for your site.

Following are the steps to access the general settings:

• Click on Settings -> General option in WordPress.
• The General Setting page is displayed as shown in the following snapshot

Following are the details of the fields on the general settings page.

• Site Title: It displays the name of the site in the template header.
• Tagline: Displays a short sentence about your site.
• WordPress Address (URL): It is the URL of WordPress directory where your all core application files are present.
• Site Address (URL): Enter the site URL which you want your site to display on the browser.
• E-mail Address: Enter your e-mail address which helps to recover your password or any update.
• Membership: Anyone can register an account on your site after you check this checkbox.
• New User Default Role: The default role is set for the newly registered user on your website.
• Timezone: Sets the time zone based on a particular city.
• Date Format: Sets the date format as you need to display on the site.
• Time Format: Sets the time format as you need to display on the site.
• Week Starts On: Select the weekday which you prefer to start for WordPress calendar. By default, it is set as for Monday.
•  Site Language: Sets the language for the WordPress dashboard.

After filling all the information about general settings, click on Save Changes button. It saves all your general setting information.

WRITING SETTING

The writing settings control the writing experience and provide options for customizing WordPress site. These settings control the features in the adding and editing posts, Pages, and Post Types, as well as the optional functions like Remote Publishing, Post via e-mail, and Update Services.

Following are the steps to access the writing settings

Step 1: To change writing settings, go to Settings -> Writing option.

Following are the details of the fields on the page

• Formatting: This field defines two sub-options for better user experience.
• The first option to Convert emoticons like :-) and :-P to graphics. It will turn text-based emoticons into graphics-based emoticons.
• The second option WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically corrects the invalid XHTML placed within the posts or pages.
• Default Post Category: It is a category to be applied to a post and you can leave it as Uncategorized.
• Default Post Format: It is used by themes to select post format to be applied to a post or create different styles for different types of posts.
• Post via e-mail: This option uses an e-mail address to create posts and publishes posts on your blog through e-mail. To use this, you'll need to set up a secret e-mail account with POP3 access, and any mail received at this address will be posted.
• Mail Server: It allows reading the e-mails that you send to WordPress and stores them for retrieval. For this, you need to have POP3 compatible mail server and it will have URI address such as mail.example.com, which you should enter here.
• Login Name: To create posts, WordPress will need its e-mail account. The Login Name will use this e-mail address and should be kept as a secret as spammers will post links redirecting to their websites.
• Password: Set password for the above e-mail address.
• Default Mail Category: It allows selecting a custom category for all the posts that are published via Post by e-mail feature.
• Update Services: When you publish a new post, WordPress will automatically notify the site update services in the box. See the Update Services on the codex for the long list of possible services.

After filling all the above information, click on the Save Changes button to save your information.

The above setting on writing will bring us to the end of this lesson. If you have followed the lesson normally you will be able to complete other settings on your own.

That is it on how you can set up can customize the settings of your WordPress website.

If you are following g along you will observe that there are still other parts that I didn’t talk about but I assure that if you can go this far with me you will be able to finish up the customization quickly without having any glitch along the way.

If you need some suggestions, drop it in the comment box and I will do everything possible to be of help to you.