We’re going to start by mentioning that if you launched WordPress from your community profile we have pre-configured quite a bit for your already. This lesson will start by covering core WordPress components and in the plugin section we will discuss what has been preconfigured for you.
WordPress Admin Menu
Dashboard – home
Dashboard, or the Dashboard Home Screen, provides you with quick access to your website content. It contains five widgets by default:
- Welcome – the first card you will see on top of the screen. Here you can access the links to the frequently used admin options when setting up a brand new website.
- At a Glance – informs you about the number of posts, pages, and comments on your site.
- Activity – here you can see if you have any scheduled posts, recently published ones, and the newest comments on your blog posts.
- Quick Draft – this widget allows you to publish a new blog post quickly.
- WordPress Events and News – this widget features the latest news from the WordPress blog. Here you can find out about local
Dashboard – My Sites
This is your dashboard overview for ALL of your sites. On our platform we allow you to build as many websites as you want. This is where you will be able to access them.
Dashboard – Add New Site
Creating a new website is incredibly easy.
Step 1: Click or hover over “dashboard” on the left menu.
Step 2: Click “add new website”
Step 3: Enter your site address.
Note: All websites are first created as (your-site-address).hyprsites.com. Once your site is created you can change the URL to “www.your-domain.com”
Statistics
This is where you can connect Google Analytics, if you have it. If you don’t have google analytics, we recommend it, but it is not required.
To link your google analytics account click, “link an account” and follow the prompts.
Posts
All posts – by accessing this subsection, you’ll see the full list of posts (both published posts and drafts). You’ll also see information regarding the authors of the posts, the date when the posts were published or modified, categories where the posts belong to, and what comments correspond to posts.
See how to create posts in WordPress in a simple way.
Add new
From here, you can add a new post, save it as draft or publish it immediately.
Fill in the title of the post.
Add content for the post body.
Customize the body text using the options in the toolbar:
- Give text a proper structure, by formatting it as paragraph, heading 1…6;
- Mark text in bold
- Mark text with italics
- Show text in a list, using bulleted list
- Show text in a list, using numbered list
- Insert blockquote
- Choose text alignment (left, center, right)
- Insert a link into the text and edit it when needed
- Insert a Read More tag, that will break the text, so that only the upper part will display on the blog home page
- Expand the list of options, using “Toolbar Toggle” (for text strikethrough, text color, insertion of a horizontal line, increasing or decreasing indent, etc.)
Click Save as Draft or hit Publish.
Categories
Here, you can create categories you’ll assign posts to. You’ll have to give a name to the category, specify the URL version of the name (called “slug”) and you can also add a description for that category.
Check how to manage categories and tags in WordPress.
Tags
In this section, you can add tags you’ll attach to blog posts. Like for categories, you’ll give a name to the tag, specify the URL version of the tag name (“slug”) and you can add a description for the respective tag.
Media
Media has two sections – Library and Add new media file
Library
This is the list of all media files that were uploaded. You’ll find them in a table, with the date when they were uploaded, and the page/post they were attached to.
Add new media file
Here, you can easily drop images or video files, so they are added to the media library for your blog/website.
Pages
From this section, you can manage the pages in your website/blog.
Pages are very easy to create, in a way that is similar to posts. However, pages are meant for static content, and they do not have a publish date. Important pages in a website/blog are the About us page, the Contact page, the FAQ page, the Terms and Conditions page, etc. In comparison, posts represent temporal content, they have a publish date and they are the main content of a blog.
All pages – you can view the list of all pages in your website, with their titles, the author, date when the pages were published, and comments corresponding to them.
Add New
This section (Add new page) is similar to Add new post. Therefore, the editing options are the same, allowing you to use bold text, italics, structure text in paragraphs or headings, align text, integrate links or add media to the page.
Comments
Here, you’ll find the list of comments to your blog posts. Hovering your mouse over a comment will let you use buttons for approving/replying to/editing/deleting comments or marking them as spam.
“How to Tutorials”
Website courses on our platform were created and intended to be used right alongside our website builder. However, we understand that once you complete these courses you may need a “refresher” and so we have embedded more than 100 video tutorials covering a wide array of situations you’d encounter building our your website.
Elementor
Elementor is a page builder plugin that replaces the basic WordPress editor with a live frontend editor, so you can create complex layouts visually, and design your website live, without having to switch between the editor and the preview mode. Elementor is your solution to creating professional websites without needing to learn how to code.
Templates
Templates help you work efficiently. Use templates to create the different pieces of your site, and reuse them with one click whenever needed.
Note. To get the full benefits of templates, you’ll need to upgrade to Elementor Pro. This costs $50 per year. The charity purchases thousands of these licenses for our network, we got you, request a community license. If you wish to hold the license yourself, you can purchase it here: Upgrade to Elementor Pro
Appearance
This is the section you’ll use most for customizing the appearance of your website/blog.
Themes
It’s a section dedicated to your themes list. When building on our platform, however, we only allow you to use the “Hello Elementor” Theme. This is a lightweight, very fast theme designed and build for elementor. If you would like to use your own theme, please upgrade to your own hosting environment here.
Customize
By clicking “Customize” in the sidebar menu, you’ll go to the customizer corresponding to the active theme on site, where you can adjust website settings.
Widgets
This area in the WordPress Admin Dashboard allows you to add widgets – small blocks with certain functions in the website.
- You’ll find the list of available widgets on the left side of the screen.
- The possible locations for widgets are listed on the right side of the screen.
To add widgets in the website, you’ll have to drag and drop the selected items from the left, to the corresponding website location from the right.
- The sidebar widget area comes pre-populated with some widgets, which you can edit, delete or replace with other widgets.
Menus
This section is destined to adding menus in the website.
To create a new menu, you only need to give the menu a name and click the button for “Create new menu”.
- On the left side of the screen, there’s a list with all the pages, posts, custom links and categories.
- On the right side of the screen, there’s a list of options for customizing the menu.
Select items from the left-side list, to add them to the menu. Then, choose where the menu should be located (primary menu, footer, top bar left or top bar right).
Users
In the left-hand menu of the WordPress admin dashboard, you’ll also find a section destined to users and user roles.
User roles are important for making teams work effectively and protect the website as well.
Here are the roles:
Administrator
This is the most powerful user role. The administrator can publish, edit or delete posts/pages, and they can also make site-wide changes, such as change the theme or manage plugins.
Editor
Editors have the right to manage content (theirs or other users’) – edit, publish or delete articles, manage comments and categories. However, they cannot make site-wide changes, like in the case of the administrator.
Author
Authors have limited access to the WordPress admin dashboard. They can only produce content, edit their own content, publish it and upload media files to it.
Contributor
Contributors can only edit or delete their own posts and read all posts. However, they cannot publish posts.
Subscriber
The subscriber role allows users only to read posts. This option is useful for subscription-based websites, when only logged in people can access website content.
Settings in the WordPress Admin Dashboard
The settings section is one that you shouldn’t pass over, when making customizations for the new website or blog. These modifications apply sitewide.
General Settings
From the “General Settings” subsection of the WordPress admin panel, you can:
- Add a site title – it sums up what the website is about
- Add a tagline – it serves as a motto for the entire website
- WordPress address/URL – this is the address you want the website to be found at. It helps defining whether you want the website address to be a domain or a subdomain (version with or version without www.)
- E-mail address – enter the email address you want to use for admin purposes
- Set the site language – form here, you’ll set the language for the website. After making changes, you’ll have the WordPress dashboard and admin area displayed in the language you’ve selected.
- Timezone – this setting is important especially for blogs. To show accurate data concerning the date when you publish blog posts, set the timezone that corresponds to your geographic area, and that of most of your readers.
- Date format – set the format for date display, in the blog posts
- Time format – set the format for the time display, in the blog posts.
Reading
From here, you can set:
- What content to show to your users on the homepage: it might be a static page (useful in case of a website), or it might be a page showing latest posts (useful in case of blogs).
- Set the number of articles that blog pages show
- Set if the articles in a feed appear in full text or as summary
- If the website is not yet ready to be indexed by and ranked in search engines, check “Discourage search engines from indexing site”.
Discussion
These settings refer to customizations for the comments. You can adjust comments settings and comments moderation from here.
Permalinks
Permalinks are the permanent links (or URLs) of posts and pages in your website.
There are different settings for the permalinks structure, as you can see in the screenshot below:
Account
Welcome to your account page.
This page manages your custom domain (if you have one), your plan, account actions, sites and billing.
Plan – If you want to upgrade to private hosting, this is where you’ll do it.
Account Status – Your status here indicates your development plan.
Sites List – Similar to “sites” in the dashboard, you can view the sites you’ve created right here.
Custom Domain – This is where you can map your custom domain. By default, all sites created on our platform at “your-site.hyprsites.com.” At any time you can map your own domain very easily so instead of your site being “yoursite.hyprsites.com” it can be simply “your-site.com”
Billing History – For anyone building on our platform that doesn’t have a website hosted by flywheel, your site creation is free and this section will not apply to you.