Yesterday I was telling you what the WordPress desktop is and how little useful the widgets on it are. Today we are going to see how to customize it.
Specifically, we are going to see 3 plugins that will allow us to control both what we see and what other users with access to the control panel see, removing, modifying or adding widgets.
WP Dashboard Notes
It allows us to add Post-It style notes with the messages we want. Very useful, to remember those things that normally happen to us. Instead of sticking it on the computer screen, here we will always have it available.
The plugin allows us to create those notes with free text, with lists and even assign the colors we want to each note. In addition, we can make each note visible only to the person who created it, or to the whole world. This is especially interesting if we have several people collaborating on the same site.
Dashboard Widget Sidebar
But if that is not enough for you, it is even more versatile, since it allows us to use WordPress widgets (yes, the ones in Appearance/Widgets) as desktop widgets.
The operation is very simple. The plugin creates a new widget area called “Dashboard Widget Sidebar” that appears with the rest, as we can see in this image:
And as you can imagine, we only have to place there the widgets that we want to be displayed on the WordPress desktop. In this case, it would look like this:
As you can imagine, this plugin offers us extraordinary flexibility, since it allows us to play not only with the default widgets in WordPress, but also with the thousands of widgets that we find in the official WordPress repository. As I always say… Imagination to power!
ABD Dashboard Widget Manager
And finally we end up with a very interesting one, which allows us to go a step further in controlling the desktop, since it has an administration page (in Settings / Dashboard Manager) with several options:
To begin with, it lets us choose which roles will be affected by the modifications that we are going to make:
Next we indicate the modules that we want to hide. It is important to know that this does not hide them only from the screen, but also from the list of widgets that we find in the “Screen Options”, so that they cannot be reactivated manually:
And finally we have a text editor to create a custom widget, similar to what we have seen in the two previous plugins:
In this widget we can put everything we want at the content level, as if it were a post or page that we are writing with the WordPress editor. It supports photos, text, videos, lists… in short, imagination to power. Obviously, we can also put the title we want.
And once everything is configured, the changes are displayed directly on the desktop:
conclusion
The is a place as important as it is underused, and thanks to these three plugins we can give it a little more life and utility, both for the administrator and for all users who have access to it. So, choose the one that you think best suits your needs and experiment with it. You will surely be more efficient and increase your productivity!
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