Guide to Extending with WordPress

Entering the Mystery Land of the WordPress Dashboard

Enter the magic kingdom of managing your WordPress site, the dashboard, where you pop the hood of your blog and touch the engine.

Of course the most important thing to know is where the hood release is.

How to Access Your Dashboard

As often it goes with technology, you have a few different options to do the same thing. The easiest route to your dashboard is via your Reclaim Hosting cpanel:

  • Log in to your Reclaim Client area.
  • Follow the top menu link for cpanel
  • Under Applications, follow the link for My Apps
  • Look for the entry for your wordpress blog; use the second link (it ends in /wp-admin) in the list to open your Dashboard.

Access your WordPress Dashboard via cpanel > My Apps. An advantage here is you do not have to remember or enter user names and passwords.

If you do not mind entering passwords (better use password manager software), a more direct route is to use the URL that displays your blog, e.g. http://reflecting.extandlabs.ca and append it with /wp-admin or directly http://reflecting.extandlabs.ca/wp-admin.

Here you can log directly into your WordPress Dashboard.

Either way, you should end up inside something that looks as warm and friendly as this:

The WordPress dashboard

The tools you will use often are on the left side. You go to see the site by hovering over the name of your blog in the top menu bar (next to the icon of the home), and select Visit Site from the item on the menu below the blog. When your blog loads, notice the top black menu bar stays visible. This offers access to tools only you see as owner of the site.

Under the name of your blog (in the same place), Select Visit Dashboard to pop the hood and return to the inside of your site’s engine.

Animation showing how to navigate between the dashboard and the site as listed above

Wrap Up

As you use your blog you will do these steps so many times they should become instinctual.

In the next section we will enter a few settings for your site. Don’t worry, you will be blogging soon.

See Also

Extending with WordPress Guide

Featured Image: Under The Hood Of A 1956 T-Bird flickr photo by Mark Turnauckas shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license