WordPress Admin Tips: 3 Resources to Improve your Admin Experience

You spend a lot of time in the WordPress dashboard, managing your online business. Shouldn’t it be a better experience for you?

That’s the focus of this WordPress Weekend: resources to improve your administration experience. Three doesn’t seem like a lot, but I guarantee you can spend quite a bit of time making good use out of what you’ll find here. Besides… it is the weekend, after all. Leave some time to play or spend some time with your family.

There may be a plugin or two mentioned in the resources below, but I’m not directly presenting any plugins this weekend (Yay!)

WordPress Admin Guide

http://wp-admin-guide.com/

Difficulty: easy

The WordPress Admin Guide is a simple tutorial site that teaches you how to get around and do stuff in the WordPress dashboard. If you still a bit new to using WordPress, you’ll benefit from this resource. Go through all the topics in order for a thorough training or pick something you want to know more about.

Customize your WordPress Admin

http://remarkablogger.com/2011/10/01/customize-wordpress-admin/

Difficulty: easy

In this older post of mine, I show you by way of video how to customize your WordPress dashboard to your liking: hiding stuff you don’t want to see and rearranging things for a better WordPress workflow experience. It’s not even the slightest bit technical: just drag & drop and selecting from the menus that are already in WordPress.

How to change your admin username

http://wpmu.org/daily-tip-how-to-change-your-wordpress-admin-username/

Difficulty: advanced

If you’ve ever used a FTP program and PHPMyAdmin, you can handle this one. If you haven’t, I’d recommend you stay away from doing this one yourself. Most people do not choose usernames that are difficult for hackers to guess and this presents a security problem for WordPress. It’s made worse when many default installations of WordPress automatically have the admin username as “admin.”

You probably have read somewhere this is not a good thing and went to change it, only to discover WordPress disallows it. Nothing is disallowed to someone who is determined and can edit a wee bit of code. This resource will teach you how to change that “unchangeable” WordPress “admin” username.

If you really want to do this but fear doing it yourself, consider outsourcing the work.

You like?

As per usual on these posts, please let me know which of these you found the most useful. Is there something you want to know about WordPress from me? Ask away in the comments!

http://twitter.com/write_clever Sue Neal

Hi Michael – I could have done with the one about changing your user name a few months back! I found your old post about customising the dashboard useful – I definitely need to tidy mine up a bit. I’d already enlarged my visual editor, but one button I use a lot these days is the ‘distraction free writing mode’ option on the visual editor’s toolbar – I think a lot of people aren’t aware of that. I love the way it gives you a full screen with minimal distractions if you’re writing directly into the WordPress editor.
- http://remarkablogger.com Michael Martine
  
  I find I need access to the various buttons in the interface too much to make much use out of the distraction-free mode, but I’m glad you like to use it.
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Tung

Hi Michael. Long time no talk =). This is Tung (Small Potato). I recently released an admin plugin, DP Dashboard. Not going to link to it as I don’t want to spam. A quick google will get you there. Hope you like it!
- http://remarkablogger.com Michael Martine
  
  Long time, indeed! Thanks for sharing, it’s definitely on-topic and helpful here.
pushpendra

I also need a plugin that will redirect any subcribers/authors etc if they try and access wp-admin – only adminstrators should be able to use the admin panel.

Do you know of any plugins that can achieve this?

WordPress Weekend: 3 Resources to Improve your Admin Experience

WordPress Admin Guide

Customize your WordPress Admin

How to change your admin username

You like?