WordPress displays a handy Welcome to WordPress! welcome panel after installation to provide site admins useful links to complete a number of initial tasks to get their new site up and running.
This welcome panel is displayed at the top of the main dashboard and is the first thing that admins see when they log in to admin for the first time.
With Easy Plugin Demo you can create you own welcome panel easily to provide your demo users with any relevant information they may need to get the most value out of the demo. Whether it’s to point them to various configuration items, or to showcase features, it can be very useful to display such information to your users the first time they access the demo admin site.
Creating a Custom Welcome Panel
Head to Settings -> Easy Plugin Demo and click on the Config link under the General tab. There are two setting options of interest here;
Hide Default Welcome
Enable this option to remove the default Welcome to WordPress! welcome panel. It will no longer be displayed to users when they access admin.
Custom Welcome Panel
This is where you will enter the content to be displayed within your new welcome panel.
Use the TinyMCE editor to create your content and when finished, click the Save Changes button. Note that as soon as content is saved in this field, your new welcome panel is activated. To disable it, remove the content and Save Changes.
If you need some inspiration, we’ve included a handy Load Example link which will populate the field with an example welcome panel. See the end of this article for the code used to generate the example.
HTML is accepted in this field. Think of the field as a post or page. Any content you would use in either, will work in this field. The content is also passed through all the same filters as a normal post or page when it is output to the screen. This ensures that emoji’s, shortcodes, embedded links etc. will all work as they should do.
Alternative Options for More Advanced Users
Developers can utilise the epd_welcome_panel_text hook further customise the welcome panel. Easy Plugin Demo checks whether or not any actions are hooked into epd_welcome_panel_text before it outputs the content saved within the Custom Welcome Panel setting option. If there are, it will perform the action and only if there are no actions hooked, will it use the content of the Custom Welcome Panel field.
The following parameters are passed to the epd_welcome_panel_text hook:
$user_id (int) The ID of the currently logged in user
$blog_id (int) The ID of the current blog