The Wordpress Dashboard is the first page you see when you login to administer your Wordpress blog and is the perfect place to see a snapshot of what is going on with your blog. Unfortunately, the default Dashboard doesn’t display much about the blog, just a list of the most recent posts and comments and trackbacks in a small box on the side of the page. Most of the space is taken over by content from Wordpress related feeds. Oh, and if you scroll all the way down you’ll see a list of draft posts.

Jeremy points to the changes Angsuman Chakraborty made to his Wordpress 1.5 Dashboard. He removed all the external Wordpress related content and placed more important information in the main area of the page. Now, when he logs in, he can easily find the information that he needs to keep track of.

As another example, Rob Barak shows in a comment how he changed the Dashboard for CafeGeek, a blog where readers can rate and discuss their favourite coffee shops. In his case, customizing the Dashboard is very important since users who want to rate a cafe need to be registered, and they will see the Dashboard every time they login. So Rob changed the contents (click to see a screenshot) to be more user-friendly by adding a welcome message and changing some minor details to better fit the blog’s content. For example, instead of Posts, he uses Reviews as the header for the latest blog entries.

Customizing the Dashboard is not for everyone, though. If you have some HTML, PHP and SQL knowledge you’ll be able to figure it out by looking at the code Angsuman Chakraborty uses and comparing it to the original Wordpress code. But if you need some help, let us know!