One of the gret improvements offered by WordPress 2.5 is on the dashboard interface. Collaborating with Happy Cog studio, WordPress offers some great improvements. One of them is about managable widgets for dashboard. It means, we can manage what kind of ‘widgets’ should be presented on the dashboard.
Also, we can create a new admin interface theme. There are already some admin themes available like WP Tiger, Spotmilk, or Fluency. If we want to customize or creating our own admin theme, we can do it too. WordPress 2.5 introduces another option to have per user admin color scheme. The idea is “call another stylesheet into the dashboard”. And, it’s per user basis. So, every person in the system can have their own theme. Nice, eh? Read more about this if you want to create one. Anyway, by default we will have two color schemes. It’s Classic and Fresh.


I created one also. I want to have a new color scheme. I know, it’s probably only visible for me, but… I like it. It’s a simple way to learn about design too, right? Okey, that’s about custom color scheme. What else can we do? Read on then…
If we use the older WordPress, there is a plugin called Dashboard Editor.

Dashboard Editor plugin allows you to add whatever you want to the WordPress dashboard through PHP and HTML even Sidebar Widgets. You can also wipe the entire dashboard or individually remove some of the more irritating sections like the Dev news, Planet WordPress and the getting started section.

In WordPress 2.5, this feature can be replaced using Dashboard Widget Manager plugin. What is it? Here are some excerpt from the plugin page:

WordPress 2.5 introduces a widgetized dashboard, but unfortunately no manager for it to rearrange and remove widgets. This plugin fills that need by creating a new admin page very similiar to the new sidebar widget manager. It also makes it so that both widget order and widget options are stored on a per-administator basis rather than everyone sharing a common configuration. Great for those multi-administrator blogs.

So, we can remove, re-arrange and add some widgets. There are already some dashboard widgets available.

• Dashboard: Recent Posts Extended — This plugin creates a new widget for that dashboard that lists out the latest posts.
• Dashboard: Technorati Reactions Extended — This plugin creates a new widget for that dashboard that lists out the latest technorati reactions.
• Dashboard: Recent Comments Extended — This plugin creates a new widget for that dashboard that lists out the latest comments.
• Dashboard: Scheduled Posts — This plugin creates a new widget for that dashboard that lists out scheduled for those wanting to see that data directly on their dashboard.
• Dashboard: Draft Posts — This plugin creates a new widget for that dashboard that lists out drafts for those wanting to see that data directly on their dashboard.

There are some other plugins available, visit WordPress Plugin Directory for more. I do not have all those plugins installed. I only place some basic widgets like recent comments and incoming links (shipped by WP 2.5). I installed some other plugins to pull some information out into my dashboard. It’s Reveal IDs for WP Admin 2.5. Unlike the prior WP version, in WP 2.5 we will not see the data ID (post ID, category ID, page ID). These IDs might be very useful when we’re working on the design. Well, without this plugin, we can find out the data ID from the URL address (just place the mouse pointer on a link) e.g. /post.php?action=edit&post=652, it means that the post ID is 652.
In conclusion, the ability to change/modify the dashboard design is an interesting feature. Even without any modification the original design is already nice, but it might not please everybody. Well, I just want to have a dashboard that can raise my productivity. :)