The beauty of the WordPress blogging platform is how extensible and customizable it is when you have full control of it on your own hosting and domain.

Something that you may not be familiar with, however, is how many ways you can customize that WordPress Dashboard.

Straight off a fresh install, the WordPress Dashboard looks almost exactly like the following image:

However, what if you’d like not to be bombarded with all this information the minute you get to the Dashboard?

Simple.

Minimize all the drop-downs (yes, all the boxes are actually dropdowns. Hover over the very right end of the gray, title band and a down-pointing arrow will appear. See the following image:

Click the down-pointing arrows on each drop-down box you’d like to close. The following image shows all the drop-downs closed except the “Right Now” drop-down:

Let’s go a little further.

What if you’d like the “Right Now” drop-down and the “Recent Comments” drop-down to be open, and you’d like for them to appear side-by-side?

You can do that.

When you hover over the gray, title band, your cursor will turn into a 4-way arrow. See the following image:

Click, hold and drag the “Recent Comments” drop-down above the “QuickPress” drop-down. When you see a dashed rectangle, release the mouse button. That dashed rectangle lets you know where you’re about to place your drop-down.

Hover over the very right end of the gray, title band, click the down-pointing arrow and open the “Recent Comments” drop-down in its new position. Notice all the other drop-downs stay minimized. See the the following image:

Three of these drop-down boxes can actually be configured to show you the information you’d like to see if that information isn’t already showing. They are as follows:

The “Incoming Links” drop-down:

The “WordPress Development Blog” drop-down:

The “Other WordPress News” drop-down:

On all three of these drop-downs, if you hover to the left of the down-pointing arrow on the right of the gray, title band, you’ll see the word “Configure.” See the following image:

Click it to customize the drop-down(s). Here’s what you can control for each of the three:

• “Incoming Links” drop-down – by default, WordPress sets up your blog to search for your incoming links (links from other blogs to your blog posts) from blogsearch.google.com. You, however, can change that to either technorati.com or search.yahoo.com. You can also specify how many incoming links you want to see in this drop-down. The default is 10. The maximum is 20. You can also choose to display the date of the incoming link.
• “WordPress Development Blog” drop-down – by default, you see blog posts from the (duh) WordPress Development blog, but you can change this title and the RSS link to see posts from whatever blog you’d like. You can also control how many items display (1 to 20), whether the item content or just the item title displays, whether the author’s name displays and/or whether the item date displays. You can only configure this drop-down for one blog, but it doesn’t have to be the WordPress Development blog.
• “Other WordPress News” drop-down – by default, you see posts from (duh) Other WordPress news, which is actually an RSS feed. You have exactly the same customization options for this drop-down as you have for the previously-discussed drop-down (WordPress Development Blog), which means you can follow another RSS feed of a second website or blog.

This last bullet takes us to our next scenario.

What if there’s only one other blog, besides my own, that I want to follow, and I don’t care about Other WordPress News?

I’m glad you asked.

There is a way to remove the drop-downs you have no interest in using.

In the top-right of your Dashboard, look for the gray button that says “Screen Options.” See the following image:

Click “Screen Options” to reveal yet another drop-down. Woo-hoo!

Here, you can uncheck the drop-downs you have no interested in seeing; not even in a minimized state. Also notice you can change your view from two columns to one and up for four. Smokin’!

There’s one more area we can customize on the Dashboard, and then I’m done.

There are drop-down arrows at the end of each gray, title bar on the vertical, left-side navigation. By default, you’ll have the following choices: Dashboard, Posts, Media, Links, Pages, Comments (not a drop-down), Appearance, Plugins, Users, Tools and Settings. Depending on what plugins you load to extend WordPress, you will see other drop-down choices in the left-hand navigation, also.

Each drop-down in the left-hand navigation can be maximized and minimized just like the drop-downs in the two columns next to it, but none of the default drop-downs in the vertical navigation can be removed.

Also be aware that depending on the left-side navigation drop-down on which you are clicked, the choices under “Screen Options” will change.

And, finally…

By clicking the left-pointing arrows under “Dashboard” or “Comments,” (see the image on the left) you can minimize the vertical navigation drop-down to simply icons. See the image on the right.

So there you have it… The Dashboard Shuffle.

Let me know if you have any questions, and please let me know if you see any typos in this post.

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