WordPress Hack #7: Upgrading to a New Version (WP 2.5 Guide)

Page 2: WordPress 2.5 Dashboard First Impressions

I think the main reason that a lot of people are squaking about the 2.5 upgrade is because it’s different and not what you’re used too. People naturally fight change and resist new ideas they’re not used to. I think that the layout of is great, and it’s as it “should have been” from the beginning because it’s a bit more intuitive. I always thought the WP dashboard was a bit weird to navigate, but I just accepted it and got used to it over time. My first impression logging into the new WordPress 2.5 dashboard was – “WOW!”:

Right away you notice that you have a bright strip with options to write a page or post, very handy since that’s what we do most often. Other than the obvious “style” changes, the things that have moved are the “dashboard” link which went to a tab at the top, and at top right links have been added to both “help” and “forums”. “Blogroll”, “Presentation”, and “Options” have all been removed. In this pic “cformsII” has been added by my “contact forms” plugin. Presentation was renamed to “Design” and “Options” is now “settings” (to the right), and “Plugins” and “Users” has been moved to the right as well.

I like the new layout better, you get quick stats at a glance, you get posts, pages, comments, categorys, tags, and draft stats all at once. The addition of tag and draft stats appears to be new. It also tells you what theme, how many widgets, wordpress version, and askimet info. In my dashboard you also see subscriber stats which comes from the WP View Subscriber Info plugin by MaxPower.

Directly below this block are recent comments and incoming links. I like the fact that each blog is a fixed width that scrolls. In incoming links the “See All” link still takes you to google blog search, but both the edit and RSS links are new. So now, you can add an RSS feed to your incoming links to your feed reader. But wait – there’s more! When you click “edit” you can change what RSS feed to use to monitor incoming links. You could change it to Yahoo, the regular google index, MSN Live Search, Technorati, or whatever you want. You control how many items to show, and whether or not to display the date. I’m changing mine to “20”.

In a new twist, both the WordPress Development Blog and Other WordPress News RSS feed blocks have “edit” capabilities as well, and can load any RSS feed you like in those blocks as well. w00t!

Since we’re here, let me show you just a few pimp tricks for your new WordPress 2.5 Dashboard home.

Add a “Notes” section to your WordPress Dashboard

This is something I think that WordPress should have by default, a section where you can write a “to-do” list for yourself or other author’s. You can’t just stuff everything into draft posts. This creates a digital scratch pad or sticky note for you to work with. The plugin that does this has the unfortunate name of Headache with Pictures. This plugin unfortunately also has been abandoned by the author (the plugin page and web site are gone) – so the previous link is a zipped copy of my version, which appears to work just fine in WordPress 2.5. As you can see in the example pic below, this plugin just ads a “notes” section to your dashboard home. Just type in your notes and “save” and they’ll be there next time you login (very handy!).

I also have the official WordPress.com Stats plugin installed. Now, in my dashboard home (if I’m logged in) I also get a snapshot of my stats in quick-view:

It shows views, top posts, top searches, and Most Active at a glance.