I have been banging around the Internet since the early 90’s and put my first website online at GeoCities.com.  The technology has come along way since those days and I have now been maintaining and developing WindowsObserver.com in one form or another since 1995.

So as I was looking around for a subject to write about for my first blog post here I decided I would select what I consider to be a very simple but useful plugin – at least for my aesthetics.

By default when you install WordPress one of the sidebar widgets is the Meta Widget which provide links to do the following:

• Log In/Out
• Blog Dashboard
• RSS Feeds (both posts and comments)
• A link to WordPress.com

It looks like this when your logged in

Now everyone of those links are very useful and provide you a quick and easy way to get to the WordPress dashboard to work on your site  For me the only downfall is that this widget is present for everyone who arrives at your site.  I would prefer to not have that admin type menu visible to everyone.

That brings me to the Admin Links Widget created by Keith Murray.  This simple yet very useful widget replaces the default Meta Widget menu which can not be edited easily.  This plugin allows that Admin Links Menu in your sidebar to be configured with more options. The feature that I really like is that this menu is hidden from all of your website visitors except those with admin permissions on your site.

Here is what it looks like in your sidebar:

And here are the properties for the widget in your admin panel.  Just select the menu items you want to appear on your sidebar click Done and the Save and it will be ready to go.

As you can see you can add a few menu items that are not available in the default Meta Widget and I also know it does not have the RSS likes either.  Most templates will have those linked in the header somewhere and you can always add those links to your blog roll to have them available as well.

So there you go – simplicity at its best which is the beauty of WordPress and the community that develops all the great features we can add to our sites.  I look forward to looking into this terrific community in the future.

Until next time – stay safe out there!