Adding information to your WordPress dashboard

This post was written 1 year 8 months 28 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

If you wish to add a widget to your WordPress dashboard then that’s a different, and longer, discussion. Instead I’m going to show you how to add a simple message, of your choosing, to the “Right Now” box.

How could you use this? You could use a database lookup beforehand, for instance, to report on useful blog/theme information. I’m using it right now to report on how my competition is running – I’m performing a count on the table and reporting the output back (see image to the right).

First of all, you need to add an action for activity_box_end pointing to your new function. All of the code discussed here should be put in your theme’s functions.php file. In this example I’m pointing it to a function named show_admin_message…

add_action('activity_box_end','show_admin_message');

Within your function you then simply need to output the HTML. Here’s a complete piece of code that you can use…

add_action('activity_box_end','show_admin_message');
function show_admin_message() {
   $output_text = "Put your output message here";
   echo '<div style="border: 1px solid #ffd700; margin: 10px 0 0; padding: 5px; background: #ffffba; color: #000;">'.= __($output_text).'</div>';
}

This will display the text “Put your output message here” in a yellow box, with a darker yellow border. The text will be in black.