Your blog has two major parts, the shiny exterior that everyone sees and the practical nuts and bolts to which only you and your authors have access. This first part is called the frontend (fig 1) and is the presentation piece that allows the world to read your posts and displays menus and links that allow them to interact with your site. The second part is, not surprisingly, called the backend (fig 2), which is the nerve center that organizes all the tools that allow you to control the look and behavior of your blog. Let's take a closer look at each.
The Frontend
When people visit your blog, they will see three things: (1) Your content including posts, images, and comments, all of which dominates the center column, (2) your sidebar menus, which allow you to display different packets of info, called widgets, that include calendars, search boxes, links to other sites, news feeds, and more, and (3) your theme, one of many that you can choose that will display artwork in the header and determine the layout and style of your blog. You alone can change the way all of the above looks using the backend.
The Backend (Your Dashboard)
In Medicine Nexus blogs, the backend is called the Dashboard, and the majority of this tutorial will be devoted to it. This is where you can manage almost every aspect of your blog. Listed below are the features in the Dashboard along with their corresponding menus (in italics), and we will go through each one individually in the next step:
- Write posts and pages - Write
- Edit posts, pages, comments, categories, and uploads - Manage
- Select links to other websites for display in your sidebar - Blogroll
- Change and edit your themes, the templates for your blog's visual style - Presentation
- Manage your authors and subscribers to your blog - Users
- Customize settings - Options
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