WordPress® All-in-One For Dummies®

Editing the Dashboard to Create a Listening Post

After you choose your data sources, clean up your feeds, and put them all in individual RSS feeds, you can finally bring them into WordPress and set up your social-media listening hub.

You can bring these RSS feeds into your Dashboard in two ways:

• Edit your WordPress install by hand. You can edit the trunk code (the core coding of WordPress), which WordPress provides in Trac at http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk//wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php.
• Use a plugin. If you don't feel comfortable doing any type of editing to the code, you can just take the easy way out (or the most sane way) and use a plugin, which we recommend. Currently, I use the Dashboard Latest News plugin, which you can find in the plugin repository at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dashboard-last-news.

Follow these steps to set up the Dashboard Last News plugin and configure it to create a social-listening Dashboard in WordPress:

1. From the Plugins menu on the left side of your WordPress installation, choose Add New. This takes you to the form where you can search for new plugins.
2. In the Search text box, type dashboard-last-news and click Search Plugins.

   The search results page appears.

3. Search for the Dashboard-Last-News plugin and click the Install now link, which installs the plugin on your site.
4. After the installation is complete, activate the plugin by clicking Activate Plugin in the Installed Plugin menu that appears below the Plugin menu.
5. Click ...