- Right Here: Right Now
- Meeting the Public: Comments and Links
- Getting Technical: Development Blog and Plugins
- Keeping Current: Other WordPress News
- Beyond the Dashboard
Getting Technical: Development Blog and Plugins
The next two panels of the Dashboard are WordPress Development Blog and Plugins. Both panels display RSS feeds: one for the Development blog, and the other for a list of the most popular, newest, and most recently updated plug-ins (Figure 4.7). You can subscribe in each panel to the RSS feed, and you can click See All in each panel to view the Web sites that the feeds come from.
Figure 4.7 These two panels are your windows on the greater WordPress community.
The Development Blog panel has an Edit link, which means you can customize it somewhat. When you click that link, you see an expanded panel (Figure 4.8) with options slightly different from those in the expanded Incoming Links panel.
Figure 4.8 The expanded WordPress Development Blog panel.
In addition to RSS feed, number of items to display, and item date, you can set these options in the expanded panel:
- Feed title: The default is WordPress Development Blog, but you can change the title to anything you want, and the panel’s name then changes in the interface. You could use this setting in combination with the RSS feed setting to display a different blog’s content in this panel and have it labeled as such. Neato.
- Display of item content: Because this panel is a mini-RSS reader, it only makes sense that you can display the content of entries. Only excerpts are shown in this panel’s limited space; disable this option if you want to see just titles.
- Display of item author: In keeping with the mini-RSS reader idea, you can also display the author of the entry if it is available in the feed.
The Plugin panel, on the other hand, offers no customization options. You can subscribe to the Plugin RSS feed, however, so you can stay on top of things.