Every Wordpress user knows that WordPress is a highly customizable from changing themes, activating plugins, changing the codes to suit your needs and much more.However one rarely customized part of WordPress is the admin panel’s Dashboard.

The default Dashboard contains this:

- Links to write a post, change a theme, etc

- The Latest Activity sidebar on the right with incoming links,post,comment stats and more.

- WordPress Development Blog news

- Other WordPress News which is news via RSS from Planet WordPress

Let the change begin!

The Dashboard has every possibility of being transformed into another look,layout and even design, but of course this requires you to have a good grasp of PHP and some common HTML codes.

The most important thing to take note is that in order to customize your Dashboard you would have to edit two PHP files known as index.php & index-extra.php, both files can be found in the wp-admin folder.

Changing Feeds

The dashboard could actually be turned into a feedreader of sorts and instead of the default Planet Wordpress feeds you could add whatever you want, for me personally in my dashboard i have removed the Planet WordPress feed and replaced it with John Chow’s feed, in order to do that you must locate this line in index-extra.php:

case 'planetnews' :
$rss = @fetch_rss('http://planet.wordpress.org/feed/‘);

replace the letters in bold with the feed URL of your choice ,so for example if you wanted to add my blog’s feed into your Dashboard you would replace the code above with this:

case 'planetnews' :
$rss = @fetch_rss('http://feeds.feedburner.com/Wpthemesplugincom‘);


The number of posts you will be able to see in your dashboard depends on how many you set in the index-extra.php :

$rss->items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, 20);

and also depends on how many posts is allowed by the blogger, for this blog i have set it to syndicate 25 recent posts.

You can also customize the posts that appears under “WordPress Developement Blog” by locating this file:

case 'devnews' :
$rss = @fetch_rss('http://wordpress.org/development/feed/');
if ( isset($rss->items) && 0 != count($rss->items) ) {
?>

and again changing the URL to the blog/site of your choice.

Keep looking at the index.php and index-extra.php files and you will see that there are tons of other things you could do to customize your Dashboard, technically you could place a logo, change RSS feeds, add multiple feeds, play games (Yes, you can with codes from miniclips.com!!) and much more, have fun exploring new possibilities.

**Update:

If you would like to add my feeds in your dashboard just copy the codes from here and paste it in your index-extra.php, but please make sure you have a backup of your original file!.

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