All content on a site created using WordPress is managed through what WP calls the “Dashboard”. It’s the control panel for everything. The Dashboard is quite distinct from the view of the site that users encounter when they go to the Home page through an online link. For our purposes, we refer to the user-view of the site as the “front end”, and the Dashboard as the “back end”.
You can toggle between the Dashboard and the site’s front end by clicking on the View/Edit link at the top of the window. When in the Dashboard, it says View Pages (if in a genus page) or View Plants (if in a plant page). When looking at the front end while logged in, it will say Edit Pages or Edit Plants. During a transitional phase while some bugs are worked out, you may not see View Plants/Pages in the Dashboard, but there will be a boldface View just below the “PermaLink” that can be used to get to the front end.
There are different Dashboard views, depending on what you are doing. The Dashboard for a Genus Page is different from the Dashboard for Plant Pages, and that in turn is different from the Dashboard for Articles. You can think of them all together as the Dashboard for a site, but you will only be seeing the part of this broader Dashboard that is relevant to the current task. When we refer to the Dashboard, we are referring to the view appropriate to that task.
In addition to the elements of the Dashboard relevant to the current task, there is also a menu to the left which allows navigation to all the other Dashboard views. Some of the functionality that this gives access to will be accessible only to site Administrators; as a genus editor, you should not attempt to work with any elements of the site that are not directly related to your genus responsibilities.
It is possible to have multiple tabs, each showing a different view of the GRW, open at the same time. If you have logged in, you will be logged into each of these views. You will find it convenient to have more than one instance of the site open at one time, especially when you are copying something from one view (e.g. the Media Library), to another (e.g. a Plant Page). All modern browsers are capable of using multiple tabs; if you don’t find that your own browser uses tabs in a convenient way, you may want to try out Chrome, available online for Windows, Apple and UNIX systems. This is the browser we mostly use when editing the site.