Guide: Admin Dashboard

Once you have founded a wiki or are appointed to being an admin or bureaucrat, there are a few key places that you should familiarize yourself with on your wiki: These places help admins and founders manage, monitor and edit. They are by far the most used and visited areas for admins.
 * Rich Text Editor
 * Wiki Activity and Recent Changes
 * Special:SpecialPages
 * Admin Dashboard

Getting to Know the Admin Dashboard
In this Guide, we'll walk through the Admin Dashboard and how to use it. Admin Dashboard was created as a centralized space for admins, bureaucrats and founders to manage and run their wiki. It's a pivotal space that as an admin you should get to know the ins and outs of.

Admin Dashboard is made up of a few different sections: General Tab, Advanced Tab and Quick Stats.

General & Advanced Tabs:
Admin Dashboard's General Tab has 3 sections with 13 buttons:

Wiki:

 * Theme Designer — a tool that customizes the look and feel of your wiki. This is where you can truly make your wiki your own. It's split into 3 different sections:
 * Theme: choose from 11 pre-customized designs.
 * Customize: pick a background color, upload your own customized skin, choose colors for links, button, header, page color and toggle the transparency of your wiki's pages.
 * Wordmark: decide between a text wordmark or upload your own design. Upload a custom favicon of your design.


 * Recent Changes — links to all the activity happening on your wiki in one timeline. Here you can monitor everything that is happening on your wiki: who has edited, uploaded, created and more. This is the heartbeat of your wiki.


 * Top Navigation — is a new feature we recently added. Here you can link out to different areas of your wiki. Think of it as the table of contents to your wiki. It helps with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well as making it easier for users to find all areas of your wiki.


 * Wiki Features — is a SpecialPage that allows admins and founders to enable or disable some of Wikia's optional features on their wiki. It has 2 sections: Features and Labs. Features has site wide optional features: Polls, Top 10 lists, Achievements, Lay Out Builder, Blogs, Article Comments, Category Exhibition. Labs has features that are still under development and in beta testing.


 * Layout Builder (if it's enabled) — lets admins and bureaucrats create pre-formatted pages for editors to choose while adding a page. This can help give your wiki a cohesive feel and make the editing process quicker, since a pre-formatted page is created.

Community:

 * User List — lists people who have joined and/or edited on your wiki (this also includes Wikia staff and bots). It lists the user's name, the rights group they belong to, how many edits they have made, when they were last logged in on Wikia and when they last edited.


 * User Rights — here is where users are given specific rights. The options are: bot, administrator, bureaucrat, rollback, Check user, Facebook Connect user, Chat moderator, Banned from chat. It's important to discuss with your community before you grant a user rights.


 * Community Corner — is a wiki wide message to your community. Here you can post what needs to be done (edits, page creation, etc), community messages, important notifications, etc. It can be used like a wiki-wide message board.


 * Help — links out to all help pages on Help.wikia.com.

Content:

 * All Categories — lists all of the categories on your wiki. This is a great tool to see what categories have been created.


 * Add a Page — creates a new article, a module box pops up asking you to name the page and then choose the layout, click the 'add a page' button and you are brought to the Rich Text Editor to start editing.


 * Add a Photo — adds an image to your wiki. A seperate module box will appear walking you through the upload process. The maximum file size is 10mb. Be sure to remember to add licensing rights after you have uploaded the image.


 * Add a Blog Post — (depending on if this feature is enabled on your wiki) takes you to the Rich Text Editor where you are asked to name your new blog first, then begin a new blog post. Blogs live on your profile page and under the category Blogs.

Advanced Tab takes you to Special:SpecialPages. Special Pages is an area full of logs, pages, reports and tools. (Please see Guide: Special Pages to learn indepth about why SpecialPages is an important area on your wiki.) < I'll be linking to this after I write it, so it will not be added yet.
 * Multiple Photo Upload — is a page that allows you to upload up to 10 images. Like Add a Photo the maximum file size is 10mb. With group uploads you can leave a summary along with choosing a licenscing to cover all images in one fell swoop. This is a great feature for when you are uploading numerous images of characters.

Quick Stats:
Quick Stats is a box that lives in the Admin Dashboard to the right of the General Tab. Here you can monitor your wiki's daily and weekly stats over a one week period. Quick Stats shows: views, edits, photos as well as a total of all three over 7 days.

If you would like to dive deeper into your stats, click on 'See more stats' which brings you to Special:WikiStats. It gives you a deeper look into stats across the board, showing activity within: Main statistics, Rollups, Namespaces, Editor activity, Anon. activity, Latest visited pages and Active users (page views).

Resources

 * Help:AdminDash
 * Webinar:Admin Dashboard
 * Help:SpecialPages