Building a Better WordPress Client Experience

so does this scenario sound familiar to you you've built a website for a client you've handed it over to them they've logged it the dashboard for the first time and they just come back to you saying really have no idea what I'm doing I take a look around and I'm completely and utterly overwhelmed by everything inside there where do I start well if this does sound familiar what could we do to make the clients life a little bit easier and ultimately stop the client coming back to us on a regular basis with frustration real problems and just really needing to know how to do some of the basic things well today's video I'm going to show you six different ways in which we can do just that we can create a much more user focus easier experience for them and like I say ultimately make our lives considerably easier so first of all the first of the six things we're going to take a look at is how we can give the WordPress dashboard a bit of a facelift make it look a little bit more modern and fresh and use this as a starting point the platform for some of the other things we can take a look at to streamline the clients experience so let's just hope over the dashboard let's take a little look of what I'm talking about so in the quickest and easiest ways of changing the way that your entire dashboard looks is to apply a dashboard theme now one that I use that I like is slate admin theme there's two versions of this I generally tend to use the free version but that does have a couple of little limitations but it also puts a link at the bottom back to the actual slate admin theme itself so you've got some branding and advertising if this is something you don't really want to have evident you may want to go for the pro version which you pay for on a site by site license but like I say I tend to use the free version if we jump over into the dashboard you can see we immediately have a completely fresh more modern less WordPress like interface you can if you want to come in and customize this with a nice little free plugin which I've covered in its own dedicated video as part of setting up the slate dashboard where we can customize things via CSS inside the dashboard itself this is quite a simple thing to do and if you come to a working with CSS you really could get in and start customizing the whole look you could even if you are really comfortable working with CSS bypass the need for a theme like slate altogether and create something totally unique yourself but like I say this is all about creating a very simple way of being able to control and style and make a much more focused user experience for your clients without them knowing necessary that you use in WordPress or if they know you use in WordPress just to make it a little easier for them so slate what exactly is it going to do well as you can see it basically just changes the layout and the styling it doesn't change the operation of the actual WordPress dashboard itself so from a visual point of view it gives you a much nicer way of working all the normal things are here you can see your posts your media your pages all those things and if we go and take a look at posts for example you can see we've got all the data inside they all laid out nice and tidy in a clean modern fresh interface so that's probably the easiest way of changing the way things look but that doesn't make you say add extra functionality there's also a couple more limitations first of all if we scroll down you can see we've got this set at the bottom that links to it still tells us we're using WordPress so like I say if you want to get rid of that you have to go to the pro version but you could use something like a white label CMS which allows you to strip off various do things like versions and stuff like that and that may well help you get rid of this kind of information but it's still nice to give credit back to the user if you want to use this particular dashboard theme the other thing as well as we don't have a huge amount of control over the colors that are going to be used we can use this default color scheme which is what you have and users can come in and go into their profile and change this cut the color scheme based upon the normal admin color scheme options so we can switch over to midnight for example or ocean and you can see everything will pick up the color scheme is being used there but this is something that the end user has to control themselves unless you want to add a plug-in in that will force this kind of thing so that's just some of the limitations to bear in mind however it is a great starting point and a good way of refreshing the dashboard so now that we've seen how we can make the dashboard look a little bit more fresh a little bit more modern a little less WordPress like what other things do we need to take a look at well something that WordPress has been really hang on over the last couple of years and I've covered this in its own dedicated video is media management it really isn't a particularly good thing it doesn't have a lot of functions or controls so this is perfectly fine when you have a couple of images a small website but what if you have an e-commerce store or you have a website that you put in lots of content on very quickly the media side of things can become overwhelming slow things down and just make it really difficult to find anything that you want so any form of organization is a good thing well today we're going to be taking a look at a very very cheap plug-in there is a free version available and if you have really really small requirements then you can use that it allows you to create up to 10 different folders that's the only thing that's limited in there if you want more than that you can jump over to the pro version or the paid for version which has a fantastic deal which I'll show you in a moment so let's take a look at how we can just start organizing and managing our media just to make that dashboard that media management section so much more user-friendly and usable so media management something that WordPress is pretty rubbish at there are a ton of plugins that they both free and ones you have to pay for that manage this in various different ways and various different levels of complexity and functions but one that I came across recently that I really do like because a it's super quick to work with does the basics in other words allows you to organize move and so on the information you've got inside your media library but it's also incredibly cheap you can use the free version and use up to 10 different folders so if you have a pretty simplistic folder structure you can be perfectly fine with the free version however if you want to purchase the full version which gives you unlimited folders you can come down and take a look at the pricing structure and that's how recording this video and I don't think there's any way this is gonna change in the near future you can see is either $19 which is the sort of special offer at the moment or maximum or $25.00 and you may think well that's quite expensive for media management but the thing that I like about this is it's completely lifetime and unlimited now this is something that means that if you use this on your own sites your client sites whatever you want you could put this on there for a very tiny tiny payment and use it as many times as you want so that's the one way them to take a look at this like I say there are an abundance of options out there so you may want things that have more advanced functionality which point I would recommend checking up some of the more advanced options available however let's just jump back over to the media library and you can see in the dashboard this is what you'd normally have you either have the sort of list view or you have the image view which will show you the sort of thumbnails with none of the extra data and that's okay and it's okay if you working with a dozen files a couple of dozen files it isn't too complex when you start to get the hundreds or thousands of files the whole media library becomes an absolute nightmare to work with and this is something that WordPress really does fail us on so use it a tool like happy files makes the whole process a lot easier so we just activate this plug-in a second so you can jump into the install plugins and we're gonna come down to happy files and activate it once you've done that let's just you're back into our media library and you see that opens up now a new section on the left-hand side with two pre-built folders or categories and uncharacterized and this is just going to give you the ability to immediately view all of the files that are part of your media library we've got three options at the top create rename and delete it's really really simple you know you create folders you move folders you push your media into those folders you create subfolders pretty much exactly the same as you do on any PC or Mac to organize your data so let's take a quick look at this in action let's just say we're gonna create a new one we're gonna call this will create a folder that immediately puts it underneath and now we can do is we can select and drag and drop these files over so we'll find one that has a person in it we'll drag that over drop it into people now people says it has one folder I say one file inside that folder and as you can see this is on a live server this isn't set up on a local server this is running on a site ground account on it one of the cheapest plans they've got and it's super fast to work with so now when we click on people you'll see that now we'll filter it out and show us only the ones inside that particular folder now you may be thinking well what if I try this out and I don't like it and I want to take it off all my files are gonna be all over the place well this is the beauty of most of these modern ways of organized your data inside WordPress with these kinds of plugins it's just a virtual structure your data your files your links to those in any posts or pages do not get touched at all so you can move these around to your heart's content after the fact in other words you could install this now and start organizing your data without worrying about any of the links to any of your posts or pages or anything you've created that uses these files be an upset lost creative 404 errors or anything whatsoever and if you want to stall it all your data just goes back into that all folder so everything is displayed for you this is just a visual way of organizing your data so super quick and easy let's come back to our categories we can also do bulk select so we can click we can now start selecting we can use the shortcuts of control and command and so on to multi select so we've got all the ones now that have people in there we can simply drag that over drop that in people and we've now started to organize things if we want to we could rename this we could delete it we can do whatever we want so it's a very simple plug-in that does one job does it very well and like I say that lifetime deal for $19 the good news on unlimited sites to me makes it a little bit of a no-brainer for simple sites with just you want basic media management so the next thing we're gonna take a little look at is how we can make the login section of our website a little bit more professional a little bit more branded a little less WordPress like notice again this is one of those things that the first experience of most users will have once they've seen the front end of your site is if they have the option to login they're going to see that typical WordPress login section which doesn't look particular professional doesn't look branded so today I'm going to show you how we can change that very quickly and very easily now there's one area when it comes to login to WordPress websites that gives it away that it's a WordPress website is the login page it's not changed in years and years and years and you can immediately see exactly what it is now we can take a look at various different ways and there's tons of different tools out there that allow you to customize this but the one that I tend to use is login press pro now I picked this up on a lifetime deal a little while back on appszoom but it's one of those plugins that once you start to use it you realize how useful it is it's very very cool it's not complex and the free version will give you some basics you can create something that doesn't look like a wordpress login page so I'd recommend taking a look at the free version I've covered this in its own dedicated video covering both the Pro and the free version which I'll link in the corner and in the description below so again check that out if you're interested in this particular plugin but this is just the one that I use so let me show you the kind of login experience that you're gonna get if you take a look this is now a fully customized login page that looks nothing like a wordpress page you can see we've got all the key things the same things we normally have and we can customize this we can add and remove and do all kinds of good things so this is a custom design we can drop in our username our password and login and we go into the dashboard as normal so let's take a little look at some of the options we have available as part of login press pro now once you've been a strong login press and you log into your dashboard you'll have a new section now there's a couple different options inside there there's things for your settings and we'll take a quick look at that a little later but what I really like about this is we use in basically like a WordPress customizer that allows us to come in and control all the different aspects of this particular layout for our login page so you can see at the top we've got themes that we click to expand that out we've got a whole range of different starting point themes we could even use custom designs if you want to now it's worth bearing in mind that if you're using the free version of this you are limited to just a couple of these designs but like I say because you can use those as a starting point and customize them well you could really get a little bit more creative anyway so we can choose the theme you stand as a starting point and then customize it to make sure you get exactly the result that you want this includes all the styling includes the images that layout all those kinds of useful things if we jump back out of this we can choose from google fonts so if you want to set this have to have the same font styling as we've got in other parts of our site we can choose from the hundreds of fonts available as part of google fonts we can upload our own logo if we want to we can set the width and the logo height we can disable the logo so if you want to cut this branding out and you want to keep the nice and clean and simple like I've got in this example no logos evident so it just allows you to log in with a nice clean login section we can control the background and again we've got different options inside there for this background image the position and the size all those kinds of useful things we can put in reCAPTCHA we can customize the login form The Forgotten pass a email address and password login details and so on form we can put in button beauty so we can customize the way the button looks we could make sure that's in keeping with everything right the way down to things like the Welcome message the error messages the form footer even custom CSS and JavaScript so if we wanted to do different things inside there customize this beyond what this customizer allows us to do well we could use that as well we came to things like trigger different JavaScript events so pretty cool on how we can do that like I say the free version gives you a ton of options the pro version gives you even more come back out of this we're going to drop out completely out of our customizer and inside there we've got the settings which is just the settings for log impress itself so if you wanted to you can see we can do things like for some login so in other words we can make the site hidden until someone logs in we can enable recapture at which point we can put in our details to link that through to our recapture account session expire how long it lasts custom password feels how we want people to log in whether they could use it the user name or their email address or only one or the other we can reset it to default settings and the thing that everybody that knows me on this channel knows I like the fact we've got remove settings on and install and again I will say the same thing to all developers out there if you were creating a plug-in put an option in there that removes the settings upon an install because as WordPress developers designers people that use WordPress regularly we're constantly going to be testing at different tools and plugins and we want the option to remove all that stuff if we don't want the plug-in it doesn't meet our needs we don't have to clean everything out ourselves manually and go through a lot of hassle so please develop put that in so that's basically what I want to cover you can also import an export and there's various different add-ons that are available so take a quick look at the add-ons you can see we've got things like logout menu login redirects social login auto-login and so on login logout menu is free however all the rest are part of the pro package and you may have to pay for these depend upon how you set things up finally the important export option is very useful for example you may create a layout that you like as a starting point especially if you do things like customizing or setting things up from a custom design it's nice to see that we can export these and then import them into other projects making the whole process painless simple and quick if you find in the content so far in this video useful and informative and you'd like to be kept up to date with all of the weekly content that i release please consider subscribing smashing our bell icon below to be notified every time that new content is released anyway let's just crack on with the rest of the video now once you inside the dashboard how do we go about actually setting things that to limit what the user can do and ultimately make a more streamlined experience well this is when a plug-in like white label CMS can really come in handy I've covered this in a lot more detail in its own videos which you can check that link out in a corner and in the description as with pretty much everything I cover in this video so what we going to do we're going to take a little look as an overview of what this plugin allows you to do but just to give you a brief overview Before we jump in and take a look we can white label things we can adjust all the menu structure we can hide things we can set user levels that custom dashboards loads and loads of different things and again this is another one those plugins that has a ton of features and is absolutely free so let's take a look at how we can use white label CMS to start creating a more focused dashboard now if you're looking for one powerful plugin the cost you know money but gives a lot of impact to the way that your dashboard works and the user experience you can provide to your clients it's white label CMS now I've used this over the years and it has grown into an incredibly powerful plugin it's brought to you by WP elevation which is Troy Dean's company so if you don't know Troy Dean or WP elevation they're heavily into the WordPress workspace and also they're there to help you create a much more sustainable business so you may want to check out their website but we're gonna say like take a look at the white label CMS so what it does is it basically allows you to do white labeling you can hide and control things but it also does a lot more now I've covered this video disowned or this content its own dedicated video I'll put a link as always in the description and in the corner right now so you can check it out but let's just jump over and take a look at some of the options we have so once you install it we've got five tabs across the top your branding you login your dashboard your menus and your settings so let's just take a quick sort of Whistlestop tour through what we have your branding now this is where you could brand this to be much more in keeping with your clients branding so you could want to put in logos and links and things so you can see we can put in a page title so this is all to do with your WordPress branding your admin bar branding if you want to you can upload your own custom logo so you could brand this your clients branding or if you want it to your own company or agency you could drop that in there the same for the alt text your howdy tags which is what you see in the top right hand corner URLs and so on you can also adjust the side menu branding so you can see there's a lot of options including your footer so you can control all these different aspects and you can see by doing that we've now got rid of this slate information and we replace this with my own custom branding so if you don't mind about removing that from there you want to keep it away from your clients you could use a plug-in like this to customize everything including the footer and also do things like remove the version of WordPress you use in so you can really take away that whole WordPress branding and put your own all your clients branding in place you've also then got the login option and this is a way of creating a very simple login page you can create custom background colors images you can upload different logos all those kinds of things are in here this is fairly simplistic when it comes to the login section is primarily only going to deal with the login if you want to get a bit more creative and we'll take a look at that in a later part of this video there are other plugins that give you more control over the whole login experience but like I say this is a great starting point if you want to create something fairly simple and straightforward as you can see I've already set up some basic styling and if we come down you can see I could live preview this and I could see exactly what my branding and my styling looks like for the login page so we hit live preview this is what we would see when we go to login so you can see even though it's still sort of looks very WordPress like we've branded it with our own custom logo we change the color scheme we put a different background in me if I want to remove things like lost password and remember me and so on I can do all that inside this plug-in as well so there's a ton of options to customize this including the color schemes and all those kinds of good things so we've got a lot of options there we can scroll down you can see like I say we can hide the register lost your password and so on and you're back to link set all the color schemes app everything we could even drop in custom JavaScript custom CSS if you want to with some examples on how we could use this to further customize things and really get down to the nitty-gritty of setting this up to be exactly how we want it to look now one of the areas are written like about this plug-in is if we jump over to the dashboard section we can create a custom dashboard in other words the welcome screen when someone logs into the normal WordPress dashboard we can control exactly what they see there I will take a look at that a little bit later in this video where I show you how easy it is to do that and again I've already covered this in its own dedicated video and all these links will be in that description below so you can check them out and really expand on everything's being covered in this particular overview video but as you can see we can do things like we can set dashboard icons and titles select the roles that the dashboard panels will be hidden to so we can control all that custom welcome dashboard who will see it where this could be basic HTML or if you use in an editor like elemental or beaver builder you could tie it in and use those will be using element or in this and you can use the free version of elemental to do this as well which is pretty cool we can choose the Welcome dashboard and like I say we'll have a look at that a little later you can control the RSS dashboard panel and you get your own it if you wanted to so if you had an RSS feed from a different dedicated WordPress site that may be things like training material latest information about your company all those kinds of useful bits of information we could tag in our own custom RSS panel and that would make up part of this dashboard that could then roll out to all of your clients that are use in your particular WordPress setup using this particular plugin so pretty cool and pretty powerful another thing that makes this very very useful is when you want to control exactly what menu options your clients when they log in will see because obviously you don't want them to have access to every single feature most clients don't care they only have very simplistic needs it could be posts it could be pages and some media management may be things like adding their own menu items and things like that we don't want to really get into plugins and templates and all those kinds of things so you can't control via the menu section what people can see so from here we can go through we can set up all the different options you can see we've got things like dashboard posts and if we expand dashboard out we can see that we've got the options for your home update search stats which matches up exactly what you can see at the top here so basically what this is saying is that these menus will be hidden from everybody's user roles except for admins and super admins so your normal user who could be an editor or something along those lines you can control exactly what they have access to and you can see this policy in all the different data including Elementor the settings so you really can fine-tune exactly what anyone can see so there's a ton of options inside you including admin bar menus which of the sections across the top you know you can really fine-tune exactly what anybody can access directly inside your dashboard so in combination with things like the slate alongside the happy files you could really create a much more user focused dashboard and if we finally take a look at the set and you can see we've got some basic options that globally set up various different settings throughout your entire site things like NAG messages you can see we've got custom CSS for the admin and I already put in a little bit of custom CSS so again if you wanted to use this in conjunction with styling the admin yourself you could get in and do exactly that so there is a ton absolute ton of options available in this plugin and the fact is free is awesome so check that one out and like I say take a look at the video where I go into a lot more detail on how you could use this and how the various different functions work okay so now we've covered a lot of different bases what about making the user dashboard that welcome screen the first thing that anybody logs in is going to see let's make that a usable space and take away all that clutter and Joe that we get from the normal wordpress dashboard welcome I think we can all agree that the dashboard welcome page in WordPress is kind of a depressing looking place to be it gives you at a glance activity quick draft things that for me I've never used I pay no attention to it's just where I log in and the rubbish that I have to see but we could make it so much better how about swapping it out for something like this a nice welcome message we can come in we can easily go through and jump into any of the different things we want like custom post type add in recipes recipe types setting them as featured we've got a nice way of messaging the developer so our client can contact us easily all inside their dashboard we could even do things like manage their site so they can update their menus the profiles the users and clicking through will just basically take us into the relevant section of our site so you can see we immediately jump into adding a new recipe all our data is already for us to start in put in our dashboard is a much more welcoming much fresher place so how would we go about doing something like this now there are some of the things in this particular custom layout things like the profile picture and the welcome message that uses the user's name you'd have to have Elementor beaver builder Pro to be able to do this however if you don't want those you just want to create something simple that just does things like link through to these relevant different sections you could basically get away with the free version of Elemental I'm not too sure about beaver builder because I don't actually use that particular plug-in but how would you go about doing it again this is using white label CMS let's just come over and take a little look at how things are set up first of all we're going to come into the template section for Elementor we're going to come into the saved templates so all I've done is I've created a dashboard template which is just a section we click and edit now with elemental we'll open it up and you can see once that loads in we just call the basic thing set up you've got the welcome message at the top that just references some dynamic data which is the user profile picture like I say you would need Pro for that however the things underneath these are just basically an icon some text I Len a button or set up and style them and all they do is they just jump through to the relevant different of the dashboard of WordPress nothing unique in there is just a link to what's already available inside the dashboard so once you've created that page and made it look the way you want a branded it up however you want it to the easy thing to do then is set this up as that welcome page so it's just hop out of this let's come down into a setting section and back into white labeled CMS come on to the dashboard and when we scroll down you can see we've got a couple of options specific to what we want to do first hide our all dashboard panels this gets rid of the default dashboard panels including those annoying things that plug-in developers seem to think that we want to see when we log into our dashboard all the latest information about these plugins let me tell you developers we don't care simply don't care we don't want our clients seen all this clutter we want to get rid of all that junk so hide in that is a great starting points you can get rid of all that junk you don't need then we can do things like add in your own welcome panel we can set up exactly what roles will see this so if you allow different user roles to log in you can control exactly who will see what then we've got what's the type of template you want to use we could use a basic HTML template and you can see we can just drop in the title and we can print our own HTML and make it full with dismissible and so on or we can do something like use elemental or if you've got B build builder Pro installed you could use that instead once we enable that we can just choose what template we want to reference and as you can see welcome dashboard was the one I've just shown you so I'm just using that and then we can specify is this gonna show the title for that section is it going to be dismissible well for this example where we've got a much more user focused dashboard welcome screen where they can do things like add new posts and so on we don't want to make that dismissible that's gonna always be there for them but if you wanted to make it you could do so that's just a really super simple way of setting things that will save that come back to our dashboard and we just have a much more user focused cleaner nicer way of allowing our users to do the key things that they're going to want to do once they log into their dashboard without all that clutter and junk that you normally get as part of a WordPress so in this section we're going to be taking a look at how can make the post listings that page listings our custom post type listings how we can make those a lot more feature-rich and ultimately a better way of working for this we're going to be using a free plugin there is a pro version available before what I'm going to cover today you don't really need that you can get away with the free version so this is admin columns let's take a look at how we can use that to create a much better user experience for our clients and our users now when you create in different post types or you're working with WordPress itself it can be a little bit simplistic a little bit basic at times when it comes to listing what information is associated with a post or a page or a custom post type all those kinds of things this is where a plug-in like admin columns comes in to save the day now there are two versions of this there's the admin collars Pro which is the paid for version which has a lot of extra functionality but you've also got the free version which for a lot of people will be more than enough and we don't even look at the free version in this particular video and again I've covered this in its own dedicated video so check out those links below and the link in the corner right now if you want to see more on this particular plugin in more detail but basically what it allows us to do is create custom information inside our listings inside our dashboard let me show you what I mean let's just jump back over into the dashboard now this is a custom post type for recipes on a custom blog that I've created but it works equally as well with posts and pages and media and all those kinds of things so you can see what we have is a very simple basic listing information we've got the title the recipe type the date and some SEO details which are part of rank math the plug-in that I've got to deal with SEO if it didn't have that in there all we would literally have is the title the recipe type and the date doesn't really give us a lot of information wouldn't this be a much better way of doing things so as you can see all I've done is activate admin columns set a few bits and pieces up in there and we now have a lot more information that makes finding our recipes so much easier but not only finding our recipes we can edit them we can delete them we can view them whole range of different things so we now have the recipe name like we had before because the featured image which makes the whole process of just finding what we want from a visual way so much easier we've got a custom field which is linked into a custom taxonomy for example is this a featured recipe what type of feature is it we've got the recipe type the date and we've got these nice little actions on the right-hand side as well now these just basically mimic that on hover affected you'd have normally where you hover over the title and we get things like copy quick edit and all those kinds of things but this is a nicer way of displaying those all the time so if someone logs into this and they're not really used to WordPress they might not know that you hover over that you get these extra options because we put the actions on the right-hand side they can easily see things they can do click and directly start working with it but how does this all work again it's very very simple let's come and take a look at the settings for admin columns let's come down to our admin column section under the settings all we have is a very simple interface you can see they've got admin columns settings and add-ons now depending upon whether using the free version or you're used in the pro version you'll have a limitation when you're using the free version for example if you work with advanced custom fields then you have some very limited ways of working with that and referencing the information however like I say for most use cases it's more than enough and that's all I'm using in this example so what we got we've got the title the date the shortcode and so on and tell us exactly which particular post type we're looking at so let's just expand that out and you can see all the different options that are available to us all the places we can use admin columns are listed we can just select that and start applying the layout that we want so let's come down and take a look at the recipes which is what I've just shown you click to open that up you can see there's all of the different columns we've got inside there we can reorder these if you want to so we may say we want the featured image first we hit update on there and now if we come back and take a look at our recipes you'll see that what we have is our featured images first so even if you don't want to add extra columns in it does make it so much easier where you can reorder think because sometimes the order just seems a little bit out of whack to what you'd want to do so that's very easy let's come back in we can expand these out if we want to rename them to all kinds of useful things so feature image may not be what you want to do you may want to put recipe image you may want to put whatever you want you can name it whatever you want you can set the width on there you can set the image style so this is context sensitive obviously you wouldn't have image size if you're working with a title or taxonomy or something so you can set things in this you can control what size images will be displayed you can come in you can easily clone this if you want to so if you want to duplicate this and then make some changes to it to speed up the whole process you could do just that we close that down let's take a look at the action section which we've got those little icons at the end we come in and edit that all we've done is set actions set the label set the width to use icons or not use icons and that's it super simple and we've now got a much nicer user interface for people to come in and start editing their content so again this is one of those plugins that the free version has tons of features available in it probably do everything you needed to do but it just makes the whole user experience for you or your client just considerably easier so we've taken a look at how we can modify various different things inside the dashboard logging into the dashboard and all those kinds of things but primarily or fundamentally we still have one limitation it's still the WordPress dashboard it's still gonna operate like the WordPress dashboard may not look like it but all those functions are going to be basically the WordPress dashboard with a nice gloss glossy coat of paint put over the top what if we want to do something different what if we want to create a completely unique experience for the end user give them their own custom dashboard that doesn't require them to even access the WordPress dashboard well we can do that we can do it very easy we do require a couple of plugins and I've created a fully in-depth tutorial on covering every single aspect of creating this which again is linked up in the corner and in the description below so if this is something that you think I really like to do something similar you have to check that video out but let me just give you an overview of the kinds of things that you could do so you get a good understanding of what can be achieved without really getting in here any coding or anything complex so creating your own custom dashboard has a lot more work involved in it however the end salts are much better so what do we got well I'm gonna go into detail with this because this is covered in its own dedicated tutorial that'll take you from the very beginning right the way through to having something pretty much identical to what you can see on screen in front of you this is a custom dashboard that doesn't even go into the WordPress dashboard itself everything you want to do is self contains this is the perfect way I'll be able to create a custom dashboard for your users based upon their level keeps them out of the WordPress dashboard and allows you to control exactly what they can and can't do it links in perfectly with normal WordPress things like add posts and edit posts you can set it up to work with custom post types and at the moment we don't have the ability to use this with WooCommerce but that is coming in the near future when the plugin the key plug-in is used to create this dashboard is updated to do that but as you can see we've got a custom dashboard it looks very similar to what we had is that welcome screen in the previous video however like I say this is completely an ugly custom we don't jump into any of the pre-built features that are part of WordPress so let me show you what I mean well if you've got the add post if I click on that we'll get taken through into a custom area where we can add in our post details so we can put our title content categories tags all the normal things you'd expect but then this will be added into the database set to be pending approval so you can have front-end dashboard make sure it has pending approval so then the administrator for the site can approve it beforehand obviously if you offloading this to a client and you didn't need that stage you wanted to automatically be allowed to actually display that content well you could do just that as well however like I say all those options are there for you if we come back out of this and we're going to take a look at edit vehicles for example there's a custom post type you can see there's all the vehicles that I've created that are associated with my specific account everybody else is posts will only be associated with their accounts so you only see and be able to edit and delete their own content nobody else's so we can click to edit this and you can see we now have a much more feature-rich way of working with the content or including custom field data from advanced custom and custom post types including things like repeater regions file uploads all those kinds of really good things so this is probably the ultimate way of creating something that's very very unique to the end-user to give them ultimately what is a completely bespoke and unique experience that keeps them out of the wordpress dashboard so if you really want to get in and create something that really gives you a little bit control of a walk at the end user can actually access this would be one of the best ways of going about doing it and like I say I've got complete video breakdown on how to do every single stage covered and creating this so if you wanna take a look at that again link is in the corner now also in the description and in there you'll find a link to all of the different tools do you need to create this kind of dashboard so six different ways we can focus the end-users experience when working with WordPress and we can make it a little less wordpress like what do you think of the techniques covered and the plugins i've looked at in the ways we can do this this something that's gonna open up different ideas for you can you see yourself implement in any of these different solutions let me know in the comment section below now speaking of the comment section if you've got different methods different tools different plugins that you'd recommend to make a better experience for the end user for your clients for anybody just use in the backend of the website let me know in the comment section drop some links to some info in there we can all share that knowledge and we can all get a better user experience for ourselves and for our clients as always all the applicable links for everything covered including the videos that I've referenced in this particular guide are all in that description below so check those out and really get to speed with how you can really expand what you can do inside your WordPress dashboard or create your own custom dashboard now some of the links below our affiliate links if you use those that cost you absolutely no more money but does help support the channel and helps me create more content for you moving forward as always - in policy this has been WP test until next time take care

Channel: WPTuts

Views: 11,431

Keywords: WPTuts, creating a custom wordpress dashboard for your clients, customer experience, custom wordpress dashboard, wordpress dashboard, wp elevation, custom wordpress dashboard for users, happyfiles, wordpress media management plugin

Id: UOcLrnPVS-s

Length: 39min 42sec (2382 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2020