Make a to-do list in your Wordpress dashboard

If you are a blogger and need to keep track of some of your post ideas, but don’t really like writing drafts, let me show you a great way to store some notes. If you follow this tutorial, all you will really need is to be comfortable with writing notes in a text editor. In addition, if you are familiar with CSS you can do anything you like to your list, but this is not needed.

We will be modifying your index.php file, the one governing your admin, not the website itself. This file can be found in the wp-admin folder, simply named index.php. Download it and make sure to make a backup copy. Open up the file with a text editor, I prefer Notepad++, and search for the following line:

<p><?php _e(’Use these links to get started:’); ?></p>

You may notice, that this is the first line of your admin dashboard, so let’s put a to-do list above this. Now there are two ways you can go about this. You can either put the list right here, or you can write it in another file, and tell the page to call that file. Writing it here is fine, but you don’t want to go through all this code whenever you want to edit the list right? So let’s place it in a different file, to make it easily editable. Above the line we just searched for, type the following.

?php include(”todo.php”); ?>

This will tell your browser to load the contents of the file “todo.php” right here. All we have to do is create a new file, name it “todo.php”, edit it in whatever way we want, and upload it to the same folder that “index.php” is found in. First of all, create a new simple text document and save it, naming it todo.php naturally. Now we need to write the list, in the following form.

<ul>
<li>List item 1</li>
<li>List item 2</li>
<li>List item 3</li>
</ul>

Save the file and upload it, you should have a nice little list of things to do on your dashboard. It could be useful to jot down some long term things if you don’t feel comfortable editing this list all the time. If you think that rearranging and touching the list takes a long time try some of the advanced features of Notepad++, it can upload files directly to where you want it to, but more on this soon, in another article.

This article is part of the Wordpress customization series, with more to come, like skinning the admin interface, so be on the lookout for new parts. If you would like me to cover anything specific don’t be afraid to suggest.