7 WordPress Plugins That Add Functionality To Your Dashboard

There are thousands of great plugins to help modify your WordPress installation in almost any way imaginable. I wanted to focus a bit more on those plugins that took advantage of the WordPress dashboard to bring information and functionality to a page that sometimes doesn’t get the attention it deserves. I’ve used most of these plugins on assorted projects in the past and the others I just found and thought I would share.

If you know of any other cool plugins that make use of the WordPress dashboard please share in the comments.

WP-Stats-Dashboard

Display your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard. See how you’re ranking on Alexa, check out your Technorati authority, monitor your ranking across multiple sites and much more. Once you install this plugin you’ll wonder how you ever managed to track your social media worth without it.

WordPress Stats

There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

Easily navigate pages on dashboard

Display a folder tree of your pages that is easy to expand and contract on your Dashboard. Designed for people that use WordPress as a content management system.

Facebook Dashboard

This plug-in addes the Facebook for iGoogle gadget (published by Google) to your WordPress dashboard.

Meet Your Commenters

When someone comments on your blog and writes a comment with his/her URL, is leaving more information than you think. This plugin displays web pages and profiles of those users in the dashboard, so you can add them as friends if you are in the same social network.

List Rank Dashboard Widget

Displays the rankings of a configurable list of sites in a dashboard widget. Includes a shortcode to display individual rankings in post, pages and sidebar widgets.

WordPress Easy ToDo

Create a To Do list on the WordPress Dashboard. This tool is very interesting if you’re writing posts with several authors.

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This is just a small sampling of plugins that add widgets to the WordPress dashboard but I thought they were plugins worth noting.