Giant Robot

x-Dashboard is a plugin for WP which replaces the default Dashboard (WordPress dev blog + your recent updates etc) with a modular display of ... whatever you want.

Until now, I've been replacing the default wp-admin/index.php with a friendly menu - most of the sites I set WP up on are for people who don't know what a blog is, and don't care either. So why am I giving them WordPress?

• It's simpler than Drupal, and you don't have to understand nodal information networks.
• It's easier than Mambo to hack on. I like how WordPress is coded. Mambo/Joomla is just plain confusing - and doesn't (IMO) separate code from presentation.
• It's really friendly. It's the first CMS engine I would be happy to share with my family. (Actually I'm not convinced that it's perfect here ... far from it ... but it can let you just get on with your stuff, if set up right.)

<rambling>Was making these damnd CMS sites in 98 but never really grokked that it would blow up one day. And slugged through version after version of the "perfect content editor" ... what was really needed (maybe still) was someone with the vision to make one with a really useable interface that just makes sense ... </rambling>

I like x-Dashboard, but I wanted it to be even friendlier for customers. So I hacked in two plugins that do the same thing - make a nice box that looks like this:

I made two, because for some sites the "Write" and "Manage" links go to "Write Page" and "Manage Page", and for others it goes to the respective blog entry modifiers. Which any WP hacker knows is not much of a difference, but for someone who doesn't know what a blog, a CMS, or a URL is, it's a big difference. I might hack in a switch to the plugin instead, but this is cool for now.

Oh, so here's my modified xb-dashboard.zip (this one defaults installing dash-blog) and here's the x-dash plugins. Enjoy :)