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Our reader base is quite the diverse crowd, and so, I want to dedicate a series of articles to those who might be unfamiliar with the basics of WordPress.  Each one of these articles is going to be pretty basic in its depth, but will hopefully help you get more out of your usage of WordPress.

To start with, the first thing you’re going to need to know (once you’ve logged-in to your wordpress site) is how to navigate around the back end.  The main navigation of the back end is mainly facilitated via the left-most sidebar.  The items that get displayed within this sidebar navigation panel can vary from installation to installation, but the main ones displayed in this image will remain constant in the majority of installations.  Also note that this image is showing all of the available navigation menu items.  Even in a stock installation of WordPress, not all of these items will be present if you’re logged in with a user role containing privileges less than those assigned to the Administrator.

Each of the top-level items within the navigation menu will contain two states — expanded and collapsed.  In the example image, the top-level item “Dashboard” is displayed in its expanded state, and all other top-level items are displayed in their collapsed state.  Simply clicking on one of the top-level items will toggle its state so that you can view or hide its corresponding sub-items.

Some of the menu items also have the capability to display notifications such as “Plugins” and “Dashboard/Updates”.  These numbers appearing on a black background are present to alert you to how many of that particular item warrant your attention.  They can appear for various reasons such as if plugins need updating, or if comments need approval for instance.

A quick synopsis of each of the top-level navigation items follows:

• Dashboard –> This area can be customized quite dramatically by modifying which metaboxes are to be displayed (to be covered in a later topic).  In general, this area will give you an overview of what’s new on your site.
• Posts –> This is where you can go to manage blog content
• Media –> Any time you add a picture or an attachment to one of your posts/pages it actually gets stored in your media library, and only a reference is inserted in your post/page.  This is where you can go to manage any of those media.
• Pages –> This is where you can go to manage any pages you’ve defined on your site.  For a more in-depth explanation of the difference between pages and posts, see my other article on how this can be a source for potential confusion.
• Comments –> This is where you can go to manage any comments that are left by visitors to your site.
• Appearance –> This is the section you can use in order to change the theme of your WordPress site, change background colours etc.
• Plugins –> This is where you can go to manage which plugins are active and installed on your WordPress site.
• Users –> This is where you can go to manage the users on your site (create/delete/promote/demote)
• Tools –> Most often used for importing and exporting content to/fro your WordPress site
• Settings –> This area contains some general settings for your site (ex. Title), and is also typically used as a spot where plugins add their options pages too

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