WordPress is a powerful content management system and is known around the world for its capabilities.
Out of the box, the content management system is branding with WordPress' logos and slogans, however it is actually possible to alter these elements to white-label the backend with your own company branding. This can be extremely helpful if you are a web development company like Cosmic (we would brand client websites with our logo) or an organisation who wishes to keep their systems branded.
You can achieve this by installing a plugin called "White Label CMS". To do this, you will need full administrator access to the WordPress website. Once installed, you will gain access to a number of settings that you can alter and tweak to personalise and brand your WordPress website's backend.
There are four segments to this plugin - Branding, Dashboard Panels, Admin Settings and Modify Menus.
The branding section will allow you to replace the WordPress logos throughout the website with a logo of your choice - you could either remove it completely to save space or add your own company logo. This includes on the Dashboard, the login page and the admin bar.
The dashboard panels section allows the administrator to make alterations to the WordPress Dashboard - you can turn off certain panels such as the "At a Glace" and "Welcome" panels across the board if they are unneeded. A useful feature in this section is that you can add your own section - this is really useful for us as a web development agency as we can add some useful help text for our customers with links to useful resources and training manuals. As a business, you could include a set of rules or advisory points for website editing for your admins.
In the admin settings tab you can make some in-depth customisation for when editing content. This includes hiding/showing various meta boxes such as the "Excerpt" and "Comments" boxes - this is useful as not all websites will need these features. While it is already possible to do this out of the box, the changes would only usually apply to the particular user making the change, not globally across all users. This setting will apply the changes to everyone.
Finally, the modify menus section allows you to turn off certain menu items. These are not your traditional website menu items, but the menus on the administration side of the website. This is a good way of restricting the things your editors do not need to see for a cleaner editorial experience - you can turn off items such as "Tools" and "Links" as these may not be needed by your editorial team.
This is a free plugin which can be downloaded from the WordPress Plugins store - simply search for "White Label CMS" or click here to download the file.
If you need any WordPress development assistance, please get in touch with our helpful web team on 0845 094 6108 or e-mail jamie@cosmic.org.uk.