I’m a big fan of things just working, and especially so when it comes to blogs and blogging platforms. One of the lovely things about WordPress is that you can set it up how you want it and get rid of all the stuff you don’t need, so that it empowers your blogging rather than just gets in the way.
In my attempts to be more efficient (also known as “being lazy”), I’ve picked up a couple of little tips to make running and using your WordPress install that bit easier. Let’s get to it!
1. Simplify to fit your needs
Ghost has been making a big stir recently with its “just a blogging platform” tagline, but WordPress has got that covered too. There’s been a surge in popularity for “admin themes” recently; plugins which “theme” the WordPress backend. Personally, I think some of the better ones are fantastic — on sites which are straight-up blogs, I now always install the DP Dashboard plugin. The Hunter skin is a particular favourite of mine; its one column design lets you focus on one thing at a time (hint — writing).
It’s amazing how much of a difference a simpler post-writing UI makes, but when you have nothing to distract you, it’s so much easier to just get on with writing. DP Dashboard is available as part of the DevPress subscription for $40/year — I’d definitely recommend checking it out.
Some sites need a Dashboard that’s a little more powerful, though, and for sites like WPShout, where I want the extra flexibility of having menus at my disposal, I’ll virtually always hop into distraction free writing mode when I need to concentrate. It’s not quite the same, but it’s a reasonable compromise.
Great bunch of tips Alex. These tips would really help beginners to enhance their website UI.
Great article, thank you. have shared it on my blog! 🙂
great post – subscribing to rss now 🙂
The much discussed Jetpack indeed! Do you not find that Jetpack tries to do too much, and duplicates functionality provided by other plugins? I don’t use Jetpack on any sites any more, preferring single-use plugins for far greater control.
I thought I had figured it out but you proved me wrong, and I’m grateful 🙂 Very handy tools and tricks indeed! I couldn’t get the svbtle work with Thesis Theme Framework though. Maybe it was because of W3 total cache or something?
Oh sorry, svbtle was in a different article I was reading at the same time!
Nice article… as WordPress is very famous and widely used, these tools and plugins are very useful to make it more versatile. Thanks a ton for sharing.
Pleasure 🙂