You have come to this post and it clearly shows that you have successfully installed WordPress on your domain. Even if you have not yet, do not worry, we have a complete guidelines on how to choose a perfect domain name and web hosting for your blog or website.
WordPress is a great open-source blogging tool that is sharing a larger portion of the total CMS usage in the internet world. What makes it that so popular you can check our earlier post to know about it.
Every WordPress-based website or blog has two interfaces. The first is called the front end which is available to all users who have come to that blog using the specific domain name or URL. And the other interface is called the WordPress Admin area which is only for the admin of that blog. The admin area is login protected and can be accessed only if you know the login credentials.
You can access the admin panel of your WordPress-based website by adding /wp-admin at the end of your blog URL. So if your URL to the blog is http://www.example.com then the URL of the admin panel will be http://www.example.com/wp-admin.
The prominent things on the dashboard are the “Top Bar” and “Sidebar Menu Panel” (shown in the fig above).
Top Bar
The top bar of the admin dashboard has the blog name, available updates count, unapproved comments count, and menu to add a new post, pages, media, etc.
These are quick stats to let you know how many updates are available and how many comments need to be checked or approved.
Sidebar Menu Panel
All of the functionality can be accessed through the sidebar panel where you can see, Post Group, Media, Pages, Comments, Appearance, Plugins, Users Group, Tools, and Settings Groups.
All these menu groups are explained one by one below.
1. Posts
Posts are the most important and fundamental part of any blog. Without Posts, a blog is no more any blog but a website. The continuous addition of new posts makes a Blog.
In WordPress, Posts groups are the first group placed on the left sidebar panel.
When you click on the “Posts” menu you will see all of its sub-menu such as All Posts, Add New, Categories, and Tags.
1.1 – All Posts
The all Posts page will show the list of all posts we added to the blog so far. If the blog is new then the list will be empty obviously.
1.2 – Add New
For adding a new post this option will be used. On this page, you will see a form where you will be able to add a post title, post content, tags, and selecting of a category.
1.3 – Categories
Categories are important. They combine posts on the base of a certain type or niche. For example on my blog, you can see a few categories on the top bar and also on the right sidebar such as PHP, WordPress jQuery, etc. Each category has posts related to that specific category. It’s easy for visitors to browse only the posts of a category they are interested in.
1.4 – Tags
Tags are very much similar to Categories except they are more SEO friendly.
But Tags play an important role in Search Engine Optimization or SEO of the blog. Search engines like Google check and crawl tags inside a post and when a visitor searches a specific keyword in google, It shows the content where the searched keyword matches the tags of the posts.
2. Media
The media section contains all the media files (images, audio, video, documents) uploaded on the blog for the posts or the pages. You can upload images or videos directly on the Add Post page while creating the new post or you can upload the files in the Media section for later use.
WordPress supports uploading the following file types:
Images
- .jpg
- .jpeg
- .png
- .gif
- .ico
Documents
- .pdf (Portable Document Format; Adobe Acrobat)
- .doc, .docx (Microsoft Word Document)
- .ppt, .pptx, .pps, .ppsx (Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation)
- .odt (OpenDocument Text Document)
- .xls, .xlsx (Microsoft Excel Document)
- .psd (Adobe Photoshop Document)
Audio
- .mp3
- .m4a
- .ogg
- .wav
Video
- .mp4, .m4v (MPEG-4)
- .mov (QuickTime)
- .wmv (Windows Media Video)
- .avi
- .mpg
- .ogv (Ogg)
- .3gp (3GPP)
- .3g2 (3GPP2)
3. Pages
Posts and Pages are two different things. Posts, with default settings, appear in reverse chronological order, while Pages are non-chronological content. Pages are used for static content such as About Us and Contact types of pages.
Normally, Posts in WordPress are sorted into categories and taxonomy marks. The pages do not have categories or tags.
4. Comments
Posts are published on the blog and then readers comments on them. It allows users to discuss and ask questions to the blog admin or other readers. This thing makes a blog more active.
By default, all comments need to be approved by the admin before they get displayed on the front side. But all these settings can be changed and an admin can allow all the comments automatically approved when submitted.
In the admin you can read, edit, approve or delete a comment. All the information related to commentators such as their IP address, email address, name, and the date on which the comment is made is available there.
5. Appearance
Appearance is a little bit tricky set of features for the new blogger but once you get an introduction then you will be able to customize or change the appearance of your blog easily.
Let’s go through all the sections of the Appearance tab.
5.1 – Themes
The first and default page of the Appearance section is Themes. So far you already know a blog has two interfaces one is for the public or visitors and the other is for the admin of the blog which we are discussing.
From the admin panel in the Appearance section, we can see a list of themes uploaded for our blog including the currently active theme. From here we can make a theme active or delete a theme or even upload a new theme. There are millions of free and paid resources on the web for WordPress including themes and plugins.
5.2 – Customize
The Customize page of the Appearance section allows you to easily customize your theme and see the result instantly in real-time. It lets the admin see the changes in real before actually publishing them.
In the recent versions, you can also find Device Preview Buttons which allow us to see how the changes you made will look on desktop, tablet, or mobile before finally publishing them.
5.3 – Widgets
Widgets are an easy drag & drop way of adding information to the sidebar of the blog.
For example, on my blog 99Points, you can see we have an About Me section, Email Subscribers box, Categories, and Related Posts section on the right sidebar. All these have been added here from the Widgets section of the admin side.
6. Plugins
Plugins are magical piece of small software that extends or adds new functionality to the WordPress system. WordPress is built in this way that is always flexible to adopt new functionality or do more with the help of plugins without touching the core files.
We will write another post about the importance of the plugins and plugins which every blog must have later someday.
The above modules are a few major sections in the admin panel of WordPress. I have tried to cover them all in a single post but a few more posts are coming to discuss every section in more detail, so please keep in touch and do not forget to subscribe or follow our Facebook fan page @99points
Please share this post with your friends and comment below to let us know what is your favorite feature or functionality in the WordPress :)
