There are a bunch of folks who don't get it or don't like it, so I figured I would take the time to explain Planet WordPress to the extent that I can, since it seems that I'm the one that usually causes the most problems with duplicated feed items, etc.
Planet WordPress is a site that aggregates feeds from a number of users who have contributed to the WordPress Open Source project, or who provide good sources of information on WordPress, its themes, or its plugins. Planet WordPress produces a feed that is displayed in the Dashboard of most WordPress installations.
How you get your site listed on Planet WordPress is a mystery to me. I appreciate the exposure, but I didn't originally ask to be added to the Planet site. Do not misunderstand, I'm not asking to be taken off. In fact, it is my suspicion that the Powers That Be added my feed to the Dashboard partially because I was publishing a good deal of informative WordPress information, but perhaps also a bit because at the time, I was advocating against the Dashboard feature and they wanted to shut me up. ;)
In the event that I fail to provide reasonable WordPress updates, then in all fairness, I would expect that the Planet maintainers would remove me. But I try to do two things to appease the WordPress gods - I restrict the feed to only my WordPress posts, and I only post to the WordPress channel when I think I have something of value to say to the community.
I grant you that there is some benefit to me for being on Planet WordPress. I'm getting more exposure for my site than I would otherwise. Still, my pagerank is probably not affected by being in your Dashboard because Google can't spider inside your admin console to see my link. The only way my pagerank would increase as a result of being on your Dashboard is if you chose to link to me in a post. Considering that you have to first choose to read the Dashboard, then visit my site, then write about my site, I think that's a fair arrangement.
Plus, you're getting my updates on WordPress development for free. What a bargain!
Nonetheless, I realize that to many people the Dashboard is considered a nuisance. Especially when my site crashes and the Planet feed repopulates with all of my entries from six months ago (be glad I didn't re-tag all of the restored WordPress posts since then, or it would have happened again). Let me give you a few helpful pointers if you find the Dashboard feeds especially irritating:
If you don't like it, don't read it. I'm sure that's simpler to say than to execute, so let me provide this keen WordPress insight: Bookmark your Write Post page. When you click your bookmark, you'll go directly to the page where you're going to do most of your work, rather than the Dashboard. If you're not logged in, you'll get a login screen, then you'll see the Write Post page. Simple.
Disable the blasted thing. As I said, back before I got added to the Dashboard, I was staunchly against the Dashboard. How do I feel about it now? Well, I like the occasional traffic boost, and while I'm understanding that many people don't like the feature, I think it's easy enough to do away with that it's not worth complaint. So. If you don't want it, install this plugin.
There are actually quite a few plugins out there that disable the Dashboard, but this is the one I wrote. I like it because instead of mangling your .htaccess, it just removes the menu and redirects the link.
Replace the Feeds. Some people don't mind the Dashboard, but would probably like it better if my feed wasn't one of the ones in there. There are a few ways to change the feeds that the Dashbaord loads.
To change the feed manually, you can edit a WordPress file. In WordPress 2.0.4, the file is /wp-admin/index.php. You'll see something like this around line number 146:
$rss = @fetch_rss('http://planet.wordpress.org/feed/');
You can change the feed URL in that command to whatever feed you want and give that a shot. The changed feed should start to appear in your Dashboard instead of the Planet feed. There are also a few other link trinkets shortly after that line that point to Planet WordPress that you might also want to change.
Of course, there are two problems with this method. First, you can only load one feed. If you wanted to aggregate a few feeds into your Dashboard, you'll need to use third-party software to produce that feed before you could display links from more than one site. Second, when you update WordPress, you're likely to overwrite that change. What's a better way?
Use plugins to change the dashboard. One plugin that I found that does the job is Dasher. Dasher replaces the whole dashboard with a configurable page that can contain feeds and "blocks", which are kind of like widgets.
Another plugin that replaces the Dashboard is x-Dashboard, which takes a similar approach but has controls to rearrange the parts that appear. Both of these plugins work on WordPress 2.0.4.
There are a handful of other Dashboard replacements around if you look, some with more robust features, some with simpler features. In my opinion, there's room here for a more customizable plugin that's a bit more usre-friendly to operate. WP-Dash is another plugin might have fit the bill, but Robert's site recently took a dive (he was hosted on this same server when it went down last week).
Note that if your main objection to the Dashboard is that it slows down your publishing process, then the best options you have are to use the bookmark or disable the Dashboard entirely. Replacing the Dashboard with another feed aggregator or replacing the feed used in the Dashboard will not make it any faster, and will probably make things very much slower.
I think those are plenty of options to choose from if you absolutely hate the Dashboard, from someone who has nothing to benefit from giving you that advice. So let me give you a few reasons not to ditch it.
First of all, WordPress announcements are widely made through the Dashboard. When a new version of WordPress is imminent, you can usually learn about it first by reading the Dashboard. This is important because many of the releases between major versions are security-related, and if you value your data, you'll want to know when to upgrade.
The Planet feed at the bottom of the page is often just noise for most people. Every now and then, I hope that one of the items on Planet WordPress strikes your fancy. Personally, I find the droplets of development information useful, but that's probably because I'm a coder. There may be certain items that interest you, too.
If nothing else, practically everyone on the Planet WordPress feed has contributed substantially to WordPress, either directly through development or indirectly through promotion. Consider their syndication a reward for their hard work. There's nothing stopping you from contributing too, you know?
I suppose there will always be people who complain about the quality of the links in the Dashboard or their content (hey, I never, ever spellcheck!), but I do believe there is value there, and for the folks that don't see it the same way, the options above should help mitigate their disagreement.
While we're on the subject, do you know of any simple non-webservice based methods good for easily combining personal feeds of your own from different sites to offer to friends as a single feed?
I know personally it's a royal pita trying to add the 8 different feeds everyone has from the different sites/services they use even for a very small number of friends.
I always start looking into finding or creating solutions but then get distracted by other much higher priorities, hehe.
Jā
[...] A while back I posted instructions on how to customize the dashboard RSS feed to your own liking. Well, while looking at my dashboard just now (uncustomized), I found this fantastic article by Owen Winkler at asymptomatic.net. [...]
I, for one, find the Dashboard very useful; it's how I find out about updates, plugins, and other Wordpress news. However, that's missing the point. What people seem to forget is that Wordpress is FREE SOFTWARE. If it wasn't for applications like Wordpress, none of us would be able to have our own blogs and even sell CMS-driven sites to clients without spending any money or writing code. I appreciate that, and for that much I think the developers deserve to put the feeds in the dashboard and the links in the blogroll.
You don't like it taking up your server resources? Delete Wordpress off your server, and write your own blogging software.
You don't like it in sites that you sell to clients? If you sell web development, and you don't have the skills to delete the feeds from the dashboard yourself, then I hope you aren't charging your clients too much. That's just unprofessional.
You don't like getting Matt's feed? He is, after all, the man behind Wordpress. Unless you have donated money to the project, you aren't being very appreciative.
In the end, I understand the complaints people are making, but I still think it's all very selfish and inconsiderate. The fact that users have put their hard work into developing plugins to appease all these users who complain about the feeds is even more incredible; as far as I'm concerned, the whole Wordpress development community is too nice.
An aside: I think the next design of the admin side will have a built in feature to customize the dashboard, but once again, they are being awful nice about it all.
Incidentally, you might want to check out http://planetwordpress.planetozh.com/ for a planet that has more WordPress information. You could use the feed from there to populate your Dashboard, or get ideas for what you could use to populate your Dashboard.
The idea, put forward by you in the first line of this otherwise useful post, that I do not get it, is false. I do get it. I understand it completely.
Read my post and you will see what I objected to. As far as I am concerned, links in the Dashboard section of my weblog should cover updates, plugins, new templates and developments. I am all for that, in every single way.
What I do not agree with, and this is very plainly stated in my weblog post, is being forced to have a link in my weblog to something which happened on April 15 but first appears on September 19. That was the link from your weblog which I highlighted - one of two. The second one I highlighted was a post by Matt where he mentioned in one line with a link a new CD by Justin Timberlake. Nothing to do with development, templates, plugins or updates whatsoever.
What all of you put in your personal weblogs is a matter for you to decide; I have no objection to Matt writing about Justin Timberlake if that is what rings his bell (it rings mine too, but I can write for myself if the need arises). I have no objection to meetings being announced, but would prefer them timely and not nearly six months after the event.
My sole objections originally were on these two points, and the fact that they are being forced on WP users rather than offered to WP users, a subtle distinction most should be able to appreciate.
Not everyone can write or amend php, whether it is OS or not (as one comment points out on my weblog). I looked for a plugin to stop the less than useful additions, and found none. I posted comments on what had happened and asked where the plugin might be, or where other information might be. The result from Matt was the deletion of my comments without any form of reply. The result from you has been the above post.
With Matt's deletion without the courtesy of a reply I decided to stuff the entire thing and deleted the appropriate line of php code. I no longer have the additional links coming into my Dashboard. Your worthy and informative post - despite the beginning where you paint my post in a less than correct light - is more than welcome, and should be added to the plugin section of WP and to the FAQ for WP to assist others.
What I would rather have seen is the WP links section - not the development section with is a necessity and well worth the bandwidth - is a cutting out of the one line inappropriate posts on matters not WP, and a better parsing of the dates of postings where information needs to be up to date. I shall miss the plugin and template information, my own choice, but not need to wade through other drivel - and I consider Matt's posted one liner on Timberlake to be drivel regardless of whether it is his weblog or not - in order to find the things I consider should be included on the Dashboard.
I also made a comment in my post on the comments disabled date on your weblog - a bug perhaps?
I don't understand people who get their panties in all a bunch over something so trivial. I enjoy the dashboard and, really, I mostly just click on Weblog Tools Collection's links to check out new plugins, themes, etc. Sometimes I'll read Matt's stuff and I think this is only the second time I've come to your site Owen. If you don't like the Dashboard, don't click on the links. Sometimes the Dashboard is useful, sometimes it ain't and when it ain't, it's killed 5 seconds of my day. Big whoop.
Pi:
This was due to the failure of the server on which this site runs. I suppose that either my site should not have been restored or the Planet software shouldn't have re-published them to the public feed. Either way, I'm sorry that my server failure has garnered your ire - I wasn't that happy about it myself.
I can't answer for what matt writes in his blog and eventually ends up on the Planet page. As I said above, I originally wasn't in favor of this whole concept, and so when I publish to my WordPress category, I make sure it's something that, had I only been a WordPress user, I would have want to have seen.
I hope you have found the information in this post informative, but I suspect that would then characterize the Dashboard feed as at least partially useful. Oh my! :)
Apart from that, I have to agree with badMike's sentiments. It's hardly worth bothering yourself over, especially when it's so easily avoided.
I always tell people who don't like it to just not scroll down that far. :o) Thanks for writing about it.
I'm one who would love to tbe able to customize my dash more (thanks for links) but appreciated the dash for what it is, a way to get updates and more info to the wordpress users. Now I am curious whose blogs are agregated in it... I thought it was only development blogs and such, but it seems all sorts. Also sometimes I'd rather those got displayed feed wise rather then stale info about updates (A smart way which would take work is that major updates are posted in order and are sorta sticky (also stand out some) and then slowly make their way down as time goes on. In other words, they would get pushed down by the other blog posts, and become just links (but maybe still marked special).
Enough spewing... I'm just glad I was able to post here. For some reason a number of your posts had no comment option... and I wanted to comment.
Owen:
Of course, not knowing that your blog had been re-vitalised which caused the old information to be newly published makes a difference. That, however, didn't bug me quite so much as Matt's incredibly arrogant attitude, and the nature of his post which gained a place on the Dashboard.
Yes, in answer to others, it's easy enough to not scroll down and the like. However, the Dashboard is on my server and using my time and bandwidth and producing - not always but recently rather more frequently - posts which have nothing to do with development, plugins or templates. Were it just those, as I've now said a couple of times, I would be more than happy. There are a lot of damned good templates and plugins out there which people have put a lot of work in to, and I am sure plenty of others appreciate it it too. However, I object to reading a post - believing it to be on development - which says 'hey, I thought you'd like this'. Why? Because anyone who knows spam knows exactly this line, and this line is what Matt used in his post.
Owen, once again, I appreciate your post, it answered my questions where Matt simply deleted and ignored.
Hey Owen... I've installed WordPress for several clients. A plug-in I'd love to install for those would disable just the WP Development Feed, leaving everything else intact... they needn't busy themselves with those links.
@Tayler: Checkout the Dashboard Options plugin which you can find here:
http://cjbehm.dyndns.org/wingingit/dashboard-options/
You can easily switch on/off default feeds and many more. :-)
An interesting discussion going on here; one that I'll jump into and join in on the fun!
This isn't a case of "if you don't like it, don't read it", nor is it a case of "change it or delete it if you don't like it."
The bottom line is that for the dashboard to be a truly useful feature, it should be easily disabled or customised. It should provide users choices for content, or, should provide administrative tools to disable it for use in sites that really don't need such a tool. The truth is that the dashboard was introduced with an eye on the future, but it has not received the attention that it deserves.
WordPress is well known for its extensibility, but IMO, the dashboard is a much-neglected part of the back end. It's not even close to being up to the standard of the rest of the product.
I would encourage those who are capable of the code-fu to jump in with their ideas and hack together an uber-dashboard that will provide users and administrators alike with a proper set of functions.
Users love choices. Right now, there are no choices for the majority of users, since editing PHP is not within the scope of most people's focus in using WP.
I could see the dashboard acting like an intranet for some organisations, where the company's own feeds get delivered and the dashboard acts as a conduit for the creation of content.
I could go on more, but I've more than belaboured the point, I'm sure.
The dashboard is the 98-lb weakling of the admin panel. Let's go Charles Atlas on it as a community and make it what it should be.
With that, I'm off to edit my dashboard to pick up some new feeds. Since Asymptomatic is already on my Google home page, I don't need to see it on my dashboard!
Thanks, Owen, for bringing up a very good topic. With 2.1 on the horizon, perhaps the devs can be arm-twisted into including some dashboard goodies.
[...] Hoy mismo Owen Winkler publica un artículo sobre Planet WordPress y los feeds del Tablero, ante la crítica que plantea el autor de Private Intellectual, en el que entrega algunos datos que podrían ser bastante útiles para quienes deseen modificar el dichoso Tablero. [...]
Quix0r: I specifically did not include "plugins" in my post that required you to edit WordPress code. That defeates the purpose, even if the provided code makes it easier to edit that code.
Craig: I've gotta say that I disagree at least in part, if not completely.
WordPress can be many things, but it was not designed as an aggregator. There is plenty of other software out there that will aggregate your feeds, and many solutions can be installed on your website along side WordPress. Plugins, as I've outlined above, can also produce acceptable results directly within the Dashboard page, if that's to your liking.
Asking for more functionality to be built into the Dashboard would require that the needed functionality be defined as something that would be useful to most users. While most users might like to display custom feeds instead of the one that WordPress displays by default, WordPress isn't in the business of, and is not even very good at, feed aggregation.
The Magpie code that's in WordPress is pretty old (also known as "stable" in some circles), and doesn't need to be updated to perform the limited demands that are currently placed upon it. When WordPress' write page comes close to being a word processor, should we add those features in too? An analogy to Word is an excellent one, since there are so many weird features added in every new release, when 90% of its users use only 10% of its features. What a waste of development time!
I suspect that the demands people have on the Dashboard are also going to be at least as varied as the current batch of plugins allow you to customize it. These plugins even have extra component modules as plugins!
I don't belive there is a single Dashboard that WordPress can create that will satisfy every user, nor is there some limited set of plugin hooks that could remove only the parts that people don't like. With this page it's either all or nothing and what we have, while not satisfying, is good enough to get done the critical needs of WordPress update notification.
If anything should change in the Dashboard, in my opinion, it should be three things: When a critical update for your software is released, it appears more prominently. The developmet blog (the main listing of three posts at the top of the page) needs to be more frequent with updates of the goings on with WordPress. The posts in the feeds at the bottom of the page should be more relevant to WordPress.
But as I said, everyone's needs are diffferent, and mine aren't likely to spawn any great revolution, especially since I'm not particularly inclined to code any of it.
Do you have a suggestion as to what the Dashboard could do better? Something that everyone who uses WordPress would agree is a good idea and that would not be better served by allowing several plugin authors to produce diverse but similar solutions?
It's amazing how everyone has an idea of what would make it better, and there really isn't any concensus.
Anyway, I'm glad you're a reader of Asymptomatic. I hope I haven't just sent you off. :)
I feel a little out of place commenting here since I'm not a developer or high-end user, but I enjoy the dashboard and find it informative and helpful--even the posts not strictly "on task". I read all of them, despite the fact that many of them are way over my head most of the time. Wordpress has been a marvelous learning tool for me--poking around in the templates to change the way my WordPress installations work has taught me quite a lot. If articles are presenting concepts I don't quite grasp, I go learn about them until I do. I might not otherwise think to research these things if they weren' t presented to me in the dashboard. Matt's posts aren't always strictly "on topic" but I'd hardly call them arrogant--it's fun and it just points out he's not boring. And let's face it, he's a guy who, at half my age, has accomplished more than I could ever hope to. I could forgive him an arrogant moment now and then! I run a high-traffic website that is hardly lofty or learned, but I get the same criticisms about things I write, also. I tell 'em to skip over the parts they don't like--just as others here have pointed out. Like I said in one of my blog posts to my readers: life is way too short to have twisted panties. Who knows, one of these days one of those articles might solve exactly the problem you are having (it's happened to me more than once!). I think I'd prefer to see the WP developers spend their time working on things that I can use to improve the experinces of my thousands of visitors rather than diddling around with something only I am going to see.
Hi, just saw your comment on my site. I have thought of two options to replace the standard feed for the dashboard, they might not be the most elaborated ideas, but if they could be a starting point that would be enough for me:
Leave the choice to the user: just add a new field on the General Options, leave the default value to the current feed
Leave it to the translators: I don't know if this would be possible, but I think that it would be very nice if translators could define a custom feed on the .PO catalog. In spanish there is an excellent and very active "Planeta WordPress" that could be a nice choice for spanish-talking users, I'm sure that there should be some other WordPress Planets on german, italian, french, etc. that localization teams should know and could set to be used on the Dashboard
Does Gregarious do RSS re-feeding? It seems so.
Owen wrote:
"If you wanted to aggregate a few feeds into your Dashboard, you’ll need to use third-party software to produce that feed before you could display links from more than one site."
Can you point for one of those "third-party software"
Thanks!
Thanks Owen, now I can change the blasted thing :P
I'll keep my ideas on this very simple: The dashboard is theoretically a sound idea, defeated by its implementation. First of all, it fails to filter what is wordress-relevant content and what is not. Second, there should be a settings section for this, with customizable feed sources. You can always fill it with the default planet feed on install, then let the users have the freedom to change it.
It might be useful to have one authority feed for WP, which I believe should be the wordpress.org blog feed. However, that weblog is too rarely updated, a not-too-ideal use of the weblog phenomenon. :)
We don't have to go political on this, let's just make things easier for each other. Let's try to implement a few changes to the dashboard and make it configurable, that should solve about 80% of the debate. ;)
One last note, Matt and the core developers have every right to implement whatever they want on the dashboard, just as we users can modify it and even release our version as long as we comply with the GPL. The beauty of open source. :)
I completely agree with Pi. The sole reason I haven't ditched the dashboard is inertia. The main problem I have is that it takes a LONG time after I login for the dashboard to load, presumably caused by the feeds (I see no other reason). And that gets quite annoying.
hmmm, those feeds a quite interessting. sometimes ;) how about an extension: a possibility to include more feeds, from other blogs you also read? may be as plugin? pardon me if there is already such an plugin and tell me please where i can find it ;) i, for my self, use my blog as an personal portal, so the step to include an feedreader inside the dashboard would be logical for me...
best regards
M
The software that Planet WordPress uses, for example, is called Planet Planet.
[...] Asymptomatic::Dashboard Don’t like the dashboard? Change it. (tags: wordpress dashboard feeds rss plugins plugin FAQ) [...]
I am an avid user of the Dashboard links and I always right click on the links and open in new tab.
I glimpse through one by one and close those tabs which I am not much interested in.
I would not even mind if something unnecessary(to me) gets published once in a while. I only loose a couple of seconds before closing that tab, but I would suggest authors(whose posts end up in the feed) to have more meaningful titles so I can very well decide whether to open it or not.
Also I would like to have this customizable within the wordpress admin area itself (without the need to install any kind of plugin)
A similar thing that I want to be able to do within the wordpress admin is, turn off the preview mode on write post / write page, optionally (but thats a different topic altogether)
Thanks for listening,
Sadish
If the Dashboard was JUST used for announcements of new WP versions and the like, then I don't think anyone would complain. My problem with it is that, while I don't object to the page loading slower in order to tell me about a security threat, I DO object to my Dashboard being full of stories about Matt Mullenweg having to reboot his laptop (I'm SERIOUS about that one). In fact, I make a point of not linking to or mentioning dashboard spammers like that in my posts.
Strange, I've been preparing to launch a journal of my experiments in using technology (computers) more efficiently (less often) in my life and my first tip was going to be ripping out that damn feed in the Dashboard, lol.
It's not that it's bad info, but people with even the slightest obsessional tendencies will log on to perform a task or write something and end up reading a good portion of the links which of course leads to other pages which branch out to other cool stuff and before you know it you're late for your own funeral. Well, you get my point.
I do have symptoms of OCD (none noticeable externally) that were exacerbated a great deal by 13+ years of chronic lyme disease... basically at this point I can get lost in the web for a better portion of the day, have no recollection of what I'd actually done online, and not even accomplish what I sat down at the computer for.
Having worked in the computer industry all my life it leaves me in a bit of a tough spot since I can't really just take a break from 'em too often. So this should be an interesting quest of mine. Drop me any tips you may have. :)
Oh, re: "You don’t like getting Matt’s feed?" quoting Montoya's post from his high horse... as a funny aside with that example, Matt's are usually the only ones I never click on anymore since more often than not they're just a link-blog type post. I really can't stand link posting for the sake of saying "this is cool," without adding enough to your own post to make it worth reading in addition to the source. Otherwise it's just a web-polluting chain-letter type practice. If one must link blog, use a service made specifically for it. Stumbleupon, for example, absolutely rules and doesn't affect the signal/noise ratio on the web outside of it's own community.
Yeah, so I own a bit of a tall horse too I guess. ;)
Jā