Admin panel - WordPress Tutorial

- [Narrator] WordPress has a front end the public facing view people see when they visit the site or the web or over the network, and a back end what site administrators, editors, authors and contributors see when they log into the site. This WordPress back end is usually referred to as the admin panel because this is where site administration is done. It's also where we'll spend majority of our time in this course. To get to the admin panel on WordPress site, you first need to log in. This can typically be done by going to the URL on address bar, adding forward slash WP dash admin. If you're not logged in, you'll be taken to this log in screen where you can enter your username or email address and password. If you can't remember your password, you can also choose lost your password, this will take you to a separate screen where you enter your username or email address, an email will be sent to your current email address and then you can go through the reset procedure to create a new password. (typing sound) Once you filled in your username and password, you'll be taken directly to the admin panel, and as you can see, this is actually the target of that URL. So if you're logged in, you're taken directly to the admin dashboard anytime you type in WP dash admin in the URL. The admin panel and WordPress is split into three main sections. At the top, we have the WordPress toolbar, which is a contextual tool bar that gives you different tools depending on where you are. So right now, I'm in the admin panel on the dashboard and that means I only really have the option of going to the front end that can switch, I can also see how many comments are currently sitting in the moderation queue and I can create new post, media items, pages and users. If I use the toolbar to switch to the front end of my site, you see I get an additional option to go to the customizer and customize my site. And as we move forward, we may add new features that then show up as new options in this toolbar. On the left hand side, we have the admin navigation menu and sub menus. This is what gives us access to all the different admin options within WordPress. As you can see it's split into separate discreet sections and each section has a sub menu underneath it. So right now, when you log in, you go to the dashboard which has two options, home, which is what you see here which is kind of a synopsis of what's happening on your site and updates which gives you a quick view of what features need to be updated on your site. We go to any other ones, you'll see there's a flyout menu when you hover over the main menu items. And If you select any of these items Say, settings, that flyout menu gets docked underneath the setting. You navigate to the first item on the list and you now have full access to all the features underneath that setting. So the admin navigation menu gives you direct access to every single feature within WordPress admin at anytime. The main menu of the admin panel is the admin panel itself. This is where you see the current information you're looking at based on your selection from the admin navigation menu. This admin panel is fully customized both to each user. Out of the box, like what we have here we get a welcome message from WordPress that gives us some information about how to use WordPress and this message can be dismissed at anytime by clicking dismissed. That means it won't show up again. Then we have these panels, that can be collapsed and open by clicking on this toggle here. We can also change the position of any of these panels by simply grabbing the toolbar and moving them around and under screen options here on the top right hand corner, we can choose what we actually want to display. So for example, here you see the welcome panel can be toggled on and off. New editor can be toggled on and off and you can toggle on and off any of these panels as well. And this screen options functionality appears on every single panel within the WordPress admin panel, so anytime you are not seeing what you think you should be seeing, there's a good chance it's hiding under screen options. There's also a help toggle that gives you documentation contextual to what you are currently seeing so you can get information about what you can do in any view within the WordPress admin panel. As you start working with WordPress there's a good chance you'll add additional functionality to your site through plugins and there's a good chance these functionalities will appear in the WordPress admin panel. They often appear as new menu items on the admin navigation menu or they can appear as separate functionality either in the toolbar or somewhere else in the view. All of these will typically be documented with the plugin and you can also clearly see changes being made as you add new plugins. For example, in this demo site I'm working on through this course, I'm using the Gutenberg plugin so you can see here under plugins, I have the plugin Gutenberg activated, and that's why you're seeing this Gutenberg option here at the bottom. More than likely, by the time you watch this course, Gutenberg, the new editor, will already be baked into WordPress core so you don't need to install that plugin. Meaning that particular option will not be available to you because it'll just be part of WordPress itself. But that's how it works. Add a plugin, usually adds new feature to the admin navigation menu. In this chapter, we'll take a closer look at the site settings option in the WordPress admin menu.