When you click the My Dashboard link in the WordPress.com menu bar (covered in the preceding section), you go directly to your WordPress.com Administration panel, starting at the Dashboard page (see Figure 3-4). Several modules within your Dashboard provide you with information about your blog, as well as actions you can take to navigate to other areas of the Administration panel, such as writing a new post, and adding a new link or blogroll.

The Dashboard modules are configurable; you can move them around on your Dashboard page and change the way the modules display. Hover your mouse over the title bar of the module you want to move, click once and drag it to the spot you’d like to display it, and then release your mouse button to drop it. This drag n drop capability is available not only on the Dashboard page, but also on all the inner pages of the WordPress Administration panel so you can really configure it to suit your needs.

You can also expand (open) and collapse (close) the individual modules by clicking your mouse anywhere within the grey title bar of the module. This is a really nice feature because it allows you to utilize the Dashboard for just those modules that you use regularly. The concept is easy: Keep the modules you use all the time open and close the ones that you only use occasionally - you can open those modules only when you really need them.

The navigation menu in the WordPress Dashboard appears on the left side of your browser window. When you need to get back to the WordPress Dashboard, click the Dashboard link that appears at the top of the navigation menu of any of the pages within your WordPress Administration panel. Each navigation item that appears in the menu has an arrow to the right of the header - clicking that arrow expands (open) the menu for that item. Likewise, clicking the arrow again collapses (close) the submenu.

 

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