How To Create A Client Friendly Dashboard With The CMS Plugin

In this post I’m going to explain how you can transform the messy WordPress dashboard in a clean client / user friendly dashboard where you can display your own links. This tutorial is very interesting for webdesigners who use WordPress to create websites for their clients!

When I was searching for the perfect CMS for my clients, I wanted it to be very simple. As a web designer you sometimes forget it, but your clients aren’t that familiar with computers and websites like you do.

When I tested Joomla, I found the back-end way to difficult for my clients. That’s why I’m using WordPress for creating websites. Last year I build over 10 websites including a CMS with WordPress, and all my clients like the simplicity of it. But there is one “but”, and that’s the messy dashboard.

Finding the perfect plugin for a clean dashboard

Normally, when you install WordPress and you login as an editor, you get following messy dashboard:

If you’re building websites for clients, all this information is too much. Your client won’t understand all this. That’s why I wanted a clean dashboard. There are a couple of plugins to do that but the one I always use is CMS by Trendwerk.

Creating a clean dashboard with the CMS plugin

First of all, you just have to install this plugin. If you don’t know how to install a plugin, read one of my previous posts. Don’t forget to activate it! If you now visit the dashboard as an editor, you will see following dashboard:

As you can see, we have a clean dashboard now!

Creating a user friendly dashboard with the CMS plugin

Introduction

When making websites for clients, we want our dashboard to be user friendly. All the information the dashboard normally shows, is way to much. After activating the CMS plugin, we have a very clean dashboard. But what I wanted was a dashboard with the most important links.

Luckily, this is easy with this CMS plugin. You can create your own file to include this in the dashboard. In  this tutorial we will do this by creating a file called dashboard-extra.php.

Creating a dashboard-extra.php file

This dashboard-extra.php file will contain links to the most important functions:

• page overview
• creating a new page
• post overview
• creating a new post
• media overview
• …

Now create a new php file (a new html file is also good) in your prefered web editor (my favourite web editor for Mac is Panic Coda, but there are a lot of  free web editors out there) and paste the following code:

<h2>Manage your pages</h2>
<em>View your pages or create a new page</em>

<a href="edit.php?post_type=page">View all your pages</a>

<a href="post-new.php?post_type=page">Create a new page</a>
<h2>Manage your posts</h2>
<em>View your posts or create a new post</em>

<a href="edit.php">View all your posts</a>

<a href="post-new.php">Create a new post</a>
<h2>Manage your media</h2>
<em>View your media library or upload new media</em>

<a href="upload.php">View your media library</a>

<a href="media-new.php">Upload new media</a>

Save this file as dashboard-extra.php under the wp-admin folder.

The content of this file is just an example, you can include whatever you want.

Configuration of the CMS plugin

Now we are going to configure the CMS plugin.

Go to “Settings” > “CMS Settings” in the left menu. As you can see, this plugin has a lot of interesting options. Fill in the name of the file you created under “Dashboard options”:

Don’t forget to click the “Save changes” button!

Result

As you can see, when you log in as an editor (or lower role) you see a nice user friendly dashboard.

Conclusion

One of the plugins I always install when I create websites for my clients, is this CMS plugin. It’s simple to set up and very effective. And I can guarantee you, my clients like the simple dashboard very much!

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