Lesson 1: Dashboard
Video (08:30)
Lesson Notes
Settings Section
The settings section of your Dashboard has all the high-level settings. I highly recommend going through one by one and getting familiar with the area. Go to General and add the proper name and tagline for your site. SEO will love that. Go into Reading and decide how many blog posts do you want to show on a blog page and if someone subscribes via a feed. Go into Writing and Discussion and decide how you want to deal with some basic settings and comments. Permalinks and Privacy are important as well!
Permalinks are super important because they will structure your site and SEO and social media have a lot of issues if you change the permalinks down the road. Set them up now! I recommend doing post name if you don’t want to reveal how old a post is. Another popular option is the post with some kind of date. Stay way from the Plain option as it adds a p=123 and that is just not fun for anybody.
Lesson Materials
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Video, we're going to take a look at our
dashboard, so the dashboard is our area
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of administration and we're going to go
through each of the different areas.
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To get to the dashboard,
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this is the front end of your site,
we're going to go to slash Log-in.
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And then type in your username.
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And password.
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And we'll click on Log In.
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Ah, right, we are in our dashboard here,
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we have our main screen that has widgets
that you can customize,
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we go from on the left to updates,
post, media pages, comments.
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WP portfolio is something
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that an additional plug in has added
into our dashboard,
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where commerce and products are also
things that have been added by commerce,
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appearance, plugins,
users, tools, settings.
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So that cash is coming from the host,
which is lyrical host.
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This helps our site get cached
and go super fast and toolbelt.
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Each of these areas has different settings
and different options and will manipulate
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the way that your front end site
looks like in different ways.
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Let's take a look at modifying just our
dashboard main home dashboard screen,
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so under screen options, these are
all of the boxes that you can have.
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So if you want to take away different
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things like the welcome,
maybe you're now familiar with everything
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through commerce are extra
things that we can add.
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We can move things around.
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So if you want to see your
events over to the right.
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QuickDraw lets us create a quick draft
for a post we can see here at a glance
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what we have, we have one post, a one
comment and one running the Astro theme.
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And we can see our activity,
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any activity of comments or
posts that have been created.
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So this is a quick overview
of your dashboard.
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We're going to be going in deep diving
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into each of these areas as
we go through the course.
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And here we are in the dashboard again.
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We have a couple new things,
but we're going to just dove right in.
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So posts, as you click on each one
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of these items, it will expand
posts are your blog posts.
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So these are things that can be
categorized and they can be tagged
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and they can be organized by date
or in a lot of different ways.
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Next, is the ad new,
then we have our categories and our tags.
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We'll talk more about
these in a little bit.
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But categories are big bucket items,
so these might be linked off of our menu.
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Or they may just be your main
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topics on your site if you're running
a blog,
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Tagg's are smaller buckets of information,
so you may be taking things multiple ways
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and it's just a separate way
to categorize or tie your items.
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You want to keep your list of categories
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short to maybe up to seven things,
whereas tags you can have a lot more.
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Next up is our media in our media library,
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we see all of the media that's available
on our site and you can also our new media
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by clicking add new
and then going and selecting some files.
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So
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that one.
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This will add it to the media library
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and then once you're in a post, you can
reference that media item as needed.
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Pages are just standalone pages, so these
are often what make up your menubar.
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And they are pages such as about or blog
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can be a separate page, you have a couple
of different options for your blog.
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It can be either its own page on your menu
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or it can be your home page
and automatically update.
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You can have a privacy policy page about
page, a destination page,
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we have all the places that you've
gone if you're doing a travel blog.
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So any pages that you need are more static
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or just don't get updated as
often as your blog posts.
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Comments are any comments that have been
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left on blog posts, so blog posts can have
comments, you can have comments on pages,
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but that's not usually
an ideal situation and best practice.
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So comments are here.
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You can also go in and approve or approve,
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reply to the comment, trash it
and so forth, all in that area.
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As well as any of these items,
you have a quick link here to go
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in and view trash quick at it allows you
to just quickly edit some basic
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information about the post or page or
media item and then are full edit
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and we'll get into the full
edit screen later.
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Up here at the top,
you can also see Bulc actions.
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I love this.
If I need to go in and publish a lot
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of different items,
I can say book actions and apply.
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Oh, sorry, not actions and apply
book actions are these two different
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things, so I can go to edit and apply now
brings me up with the quick edit screen.
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And so if I want to change the author
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to someone or if I want to change
the comments to not allow comments or
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the status,
you can modify all of that within quickly
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and it will apply to everything
that you have chosen.
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Further in the screen,
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you can filter by date,
so if you want to see everything that was
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written in May of twenty nineteen,
not much
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or by category, let's go back to November.
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We wrote everything in November.
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And then or I wrote everything
in the summer of twenty eighteen.
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There we go, there's some blog posts
and you can also filter by categories.
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So if we want to see everything that is
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adventure place or everything that is
road trip, we can filter even further.
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This is a nice way to dial
down into different things.
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As you get more blog posts,
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you can imagine that it
becomes harder and harder to kind of find
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that blog post that you need to update
or that you want to reference to.
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So categories and dates
are a great way to.
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To go in and filter to that next step,
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we have appearance,
these are themes that we have available,
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we'll get more into themes
and future video.
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We have also widgets
and menus in this menu bar.
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So we'll get more into
that in a future video.
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Plugins.
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Are all of our plug ins that we
have available for users?
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And some tools.
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Thanks for watching.
Explore the dashboard and familiarize yourself where different settings live.