If you’re creating a website for a client you will normally find they don’t want to learn how to use everything in the WordPress admin panel. They probably hired you so that they didn’t have to learn loads of new stuff and I’m sure what they wanted was a simple admin panel that made updating their site easy.

Unfortunately, as brilliant as WordPress is, if you simply gave them a login and left them to it the chances are they’d look at the admin panel, get scared and never go there again, or start changing all of the settings until they broke something. Luckily, there are a ton of different ways we can modify the WordPress admin panel to make it quicker and easier for our clients to use.

Hiding stuff they don’t need

This one is obvious, if they can’t see a button to click, then they can’t click it! I normally hide things to do with automated site backups (which you should be doing on all of your sites!), settings (for the site and plugins) etc. Basically stuff they wouldn’t normally need to use.

For this I use WPLite. Once installed WPLite gives you a list of all the options on the left menu in WordPress with a checkbox next to it. Simply select the ones you want to hide from the menu and that’s it! There is no editing any of WPs files and if in the future they need to see an option that they currently can’t, it’s as simple as logging in and changing some options.

Just don’t forget not to hide the WPLite link from yourself! There is an option to show everything to admin users so it’s advisable to do that and set yourself up as admin and the other users as something else if possible.

A similar plugin to this that I haven’t tested is the Hide Admin Panels plugin which says it will let you hide certain admin options from specific users. This could come in very hand for some sites.

Integrating Analytics

Everybody wants to know how much traffic they’re getting on their new website but giving a user some login credentials and a link to update their website and then some more credentials and another link for their web statistics can be a little overwhelming for them. Luckily there is a nice plugin for WordPress that allows you to easily integrate Google Analytics into the WordPress dashboard. No more links, no more login details, it just works! Have a look at Google Analyticator.

Custom WordPress Option Panels

If you’ve made a custom theme for a client. It might be a good idea to add some custom options to that theme to make it a better fit for the users. I wrote a post a little while back on Custom WordPress Option Panels that rounded up some tutorials.

Nettuts

How to Create a Better WordPress Options Panel

WPShout

Create an advanced options page in WordPress

ThemeForest

Create an options page for your WordPress theme

ForTheLose

How to create an options page for your WordPress theme

Vitali Software

Add an options page to your WordPress theme

It’s all to do with AB testing when you’re running your site on WordPress. Don’t worry if you don’t know what AB testing is, he goes through it in the video.

I tried to embed the video in here but it didn’t want to work so here’s a link to AB Testing in WordPress from Carsonified.

Just print it off, stick it on a wall near your desk and I’m sure it will help.

Download the WordPress cheat sheet here.

Now people are taking this method further, rather than just using a simple theme as a starting point for creating a new template, there are dedicated ‘framework’ themes which only contain the code necessary for the theme to work. This way you can start with the framework and build your theme around it. Obviously you’re going to be relying a lot on the framework so selecting the best one will be important. I’m going to go through a few WordPress frameworks in this post.

Whiteboard

WPFramework

Thematic

Carrington

Themehybrid

Buffet

WordPress Starter Theme

Ashford

Sandbox

OnePress

Naked WordPress

Starkers

You might also want to have a look at what wordpress.org says about frameworks.

I’d be interested to hear which frameworks are popular and the reasons people like and dislike certain frameworks so that in the future I could do a guide on creating a theme with the most popular framework.

Backup WordPress

Now this isn’t really a plugin that will make your blog more secure, but it is so important I thought I’d include it anyway. Your blog could go down for loads of reasons, from server failure, to hackers and if for some reason you are unable to get your data back then this plugin would be a godsend.

What it does is to backup your database every day and your whole installation (files and all) every week. It will store a certain amount of backups on the server (the number is definable in the admin panel) and it will even email you the backups it does. I have all the backups emailed to my hotmail account which I only really use for Xbox Live. You can also generate on demand backups whenever you want.

Secure WP

Secure WP automatically performs a range of modifications to your WordPress installation to make it dramatically more secure. Simple things like creating an index.html file in your /plugins directory to stop potential hackers seeing what plugins you have installed and hiding the tooltips on the login page will make your blog a lot more hacker proof.

Limit Login Attempts

One method hackers use to gain access to password protected areas is something called a brute force attack. This is basically where they try to guess your password again and again until eventually they get it right. The limit login attempts plugin allows you to limit the amount of times the person trying to login can get their username or password wrong. Say you set the limit to five and they get their username or password wrong five times, they will not be able to try again for a set amount of time. This seriously limits the efficiency of brute force attacks.

Limit login attempts can also be set to log every failed login attempt and to email the blogs admin whenever a failed login occurs.

These packs are also great for testing how themes you have downloaded from elsewhere will look with lots of content added.

WP Dummy Content Plugin

This WordPress plugin will automatically generate some dummy content into your development WordPress installation without having to import anything directly into the database. It will also give you the option of what sort of content you want to generate and everything can be removed with one click!

WP Candy Sample WordPress Content

The WP Candy sample content is a simple file you import into WordPress through your admin panel. The whole procedure is very simple. It includes posts with blockquotes, ordered and unordered lists, floating images, categories with sub categories and more.

Church Crunch Dummy Data

Like the WP Candy import, these posts are easily imported through the WordPress admin panel. This import contains categories, sub categories, pages, sub pages, comments with gravatars and more.

WP .XML Test Data Import

Once again this is an XML file that is imported through your WordPress admin panel. This one contains pages, posts, tags, comments with gravatars etc.

Sndbx Dummy Content

This one was the content used in a WordPress design competition. There is a demo of the content provided by the import here.

Think Design Lorem Ipsum Test Post Pack

This is another XML file that is imported through the WordPress admin panel. We are told on the Think Design site what the pack includes categories, sub-categories, pages, sub-pages, 30 test posts, tags, thumbnails via custom fields and some more.