Customizing WordPress Administration Panels

Tips for WordPress 1.5
While some of these tips may apply to WordPress 1.6, that version is still not available to the general public. These tips and tricks apply to WordPress 1.5.

WordPress is highly customizable. Every part and piece of the full WordPress version can be customized, including the WordPress Administration Panel. In general, it is highly recommended that you do not change these, as it makes it harder to upgrade your WordPress version, but if you keep a lot of notes on what you have done, and you accept that this will make upgrading more complicated, then the decision is up to you.

There are a lot of tips and tricks for customizing your WordPress Aministration Panels. Some of these involve changing the files that generate your Administration Panels, while others make changes using WordPress Plugins. In a future article, I’ll talk about changing the entire look of your WordPress Administration panels, but for now, let’s start small and look at some tips and tricks you can do to improve management and administration of your WordPress blog.

Write Post Panel

To change the size of the Excerpt box on the post.php which handles your Write Post Panel content, edit the wp-admin/wp-admin.css file section that states:

#excerpt {
	height: 1.8em;
	width: 98%;
}

to:

#excerpt {
	height: 5em;
	width: 98%;
}

Be sure and hit SHIFT+F5 (Refresh) or Cntrl+Shift+R in FireFox to completely reload a fresh version of the page.

To change the size of the Write Post textarea, giving you more room in which to write your post, with a text editor, open wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php and change:

<?php
$rows = get_settings('default_post_edit_rows');
if (($rows  100)) {
$rows = 10;
}
?>
<div>
<textarea rows="<?php echo $rows; ?>" cols="40" name="content" tabindex="5" id="content">

Change $rows = 10 to $rows = 30 or whatever height works for you.

Save and upload the file to the site server.

Preview Draft Posts

Working on a complex layout in your Write Post panel? Need to see what the results will be before you post? Since the Post Preview window only shows text and what styles you provide in the wp-admin.css style sheet, you can go one step further and actually preview your post before you publish it.

• While the post is still marked as DRAFT, click Save and Continue Editing.
• At the top of the screen in the browser address bar, note the post ID number.
• In another browser window, type in the address for a normal post on your site, replacing the permalink address, if you use them, with the post ID

  example.com/index.php?p=432

The page in the browser will be a “preview” of your post within your Theme. If you see something that needs fixing, make the change in the first browser window where you are editing your post, click Save and Continue Editing and then click over on the second browser window and do a complete refresh. You should see your changes. You can also run this page through a validator to check for errors.

Remember, this can only be done when the post is a DRAFT. If you have published a post for future posting and you want to check it, you can change the status back to DRAFT and then you will be able to use this method.

Post Preview

The Post Preview is definitely inadequate. If you, like me, are tired of seeing the images and graphics not line up right in the Preview, add this to the wp-admin/wp-admin.css, or whatever your Theme image alignment styles are:

img.centered { display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; }
img.right { padding: 4px; margin: 0 0 2px 7px; display: inline; }
img.left { padding: 4px; margin: 0 7px 2px 0; display: inline; }
.right { float: right; }
.left { float: left }

Customizing Number of Posts on the Manage Panel

By default, the number of posts viewed on the Manage Posts panel is 15. I often have just that many posts awaiting future release. This doesn’t help me see the post coming out today. Fifteen posts is just not enough information.

To change the number of posts viewed within the Manage Posts panel, open the wp-admin/edit.php file in a text editor and around Line 70 look for:

$what_to_show = 'posts';
$posts_per_page = 15;

and change that to

$what_to_show = 'posts';
$posts_per_page = 50;

Make the 50 whatever number you want. Do not make it too high as it can eat up a lot of resources pulling so many from the database, if you are worried about things like that.

Below it a few lines is a line that displays on the screen that says:

_e('Last 15 Posts');

Change that to:

_e('Last 50 Posts');

More Administration Panel Tips and Tricks

Here are some more tips and tricks for changing the WordPress Administration Panels and administering your WordPress site or blog.

• WordPress Administration Panel Themes – There is a growing list of WordPress Themes for the Administration Panels to quickly change the look and layout.
• Changing the Quicktag Buttons in the Write Post Admin Screen
• Showing the Bad Behavior Stats Plugin in the WordPress Administration Panels
• Linking to Posts, Pages, and Categories in WordPress – From the Write Post Administration Panel, creating links is easy, but links to other posts, Pages, and categories within your own site offers up more challenges.
• Creating Colored Quickags in the Write Post Administration Panels
• Using the WordPress Press It Feature to Quickly Add Posts While Surfing the Internet
• Taking Notes with the Notepad Plugin in WordPress
• WordPress Housekeeping – As administrator of your site, remember to take time to clean up your WordPress site and that includes cleaning out and updating plugins and themes.
• WordPress Maintenance – Like housekeeping, as the site administrator, your WordPress site needs to be maintained to keep it up to date and running smoothly.
• Administrating Your WordPress Site
• My Daily Tasks With WordPress – Showing How I Administer My WordPress Site

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