The left menu bar is also static throughout the admin section. It has useful links, some of which are expandable.

The left menu bar has links to the following pages in the admin section:

• Dashboard: Dashboard shows at a glance the state of the blog, recent comments, incoming links and Quick Edit.

• Separator/ Iconifier: Below the Dashboard link and also below the Comments link in the left menu bar of the admin section, there is a separator link. On clicking over that, all the text links in the left menu bar get iconified and as a result we get more space for editing. Clicking on that link again, deiconifies the left menu bar and shows the text again. 

Now that Wordpress is installed on your machine, let’s look at various features that Wordpress offers in a blog. While your local website is at http://localhost/localblog , you will be administering and managing the site through your administrator account which was setup during installation. Visit http://localhost/ localblog/wp-admin/ and enter your username as ‘admin’ and the password which was displayed to you during installation. After logging in successfully, you will be displayed the Wordpress Dashboard Screen.

The Wordpress Dashboard is status summary screen of all the activities and statistics related your blog. It shows at a glance the number of posts or articles published, the pages published, the number of categories & tags in the blog. It also shows comment related statistics i.e., how many total comments, of that how many were approved, how many are still pending for moderation and how many comments are marked as spam.

Wordpress is free and very easy to install. In fact, the entire Wordpress installation process takes less than 5 minutes! The minimum requirements for installing Wordpress are a Web Server with your Web Host or on your machine, a text editor, FTP software and a Web Browser.

You can install Wordpress remotely or locally. If you are planning to launch a blog publicly, then you need to install Wordpress on your Web Host’s server. This is called Wordpress Remote Installation. If you need to learn Wordpress, test Wordpress, or use blog for private purposes, then you can install Wordpress locally on your machine. This is called Wordpress Local Installation. But before installing on your machine, you need to have or install a Web Server running PHP and MySQL on your machine. XAMPP is a free web server that you can download and easily install on your machine.

Wordpress is a free sophisticated blogging software application used to create feature-rich great looking and fully functional blogs. Using Wordpress, you can write blog posts which include text, images, videos or audios, organize them in categories, change the entire look & feel of your blog by choosing attractive theme, interact with your blog readers through comments and let readers subscribe to your blog. While Wordpress is a complete self-sufficient in itself as a blogging tool, you can extend it’s functionality beyond imagination by using extensions to Wordpress known as Wordpress Plugins.

For those having some web programming knowledge, Wordpress is created using PHP, MySQL, HTML and CSS. For those not knowing any programming or web designing, there is no need to worry. Because for writing articles, categorizing them, choosing themes, installing or uninstalling plugins, moderating comments and doing most of the blog creation and maintenance tasks, no programming skills are required. Wordpress hides the coding parts from non-programmers and lets them administer their blogs using very simple and intuitive User interface. For programmers, Wordpress offers free and easy access to the complete source code of the blog, so that they can customize or extend the functionality of their blog. There is very extensive documentation available for wordpress including tutorials, manuals, etc. There is a very large Wordpress user community, through which users and developers help each other through support forums and groups