While working on a client’s website this week, I found one very nice thing, I want to share with all of you. On the dashboard I found a widget with a YouTube video of a recorded training session.

Adding a video to the dashboard

The solution used on this client website was done with a custom dashboard widget, and the URL to the video could be set on a large settings page the agency was using to define various options for different features of the WordPress installation.

I thought that this video was really an amazing idea, and my first intention was to implement something like this myself. But “unfortunately”, there is usually a plugin for such a thing implemented by someone else. So while I could not code another plugin, I found some potential plugin. The most basic one is Video Dashboard by Brian Johnson. Here you can add up to 50 videos from YouTube or Vimeo and also control the minimum role someone needs to have to see the videos. A similar plugin is Videos on Admin Dashboard. Here you can only add up to 2 YouTube or Vimeo videos and also control the role. Interestingly, the plugin seems to use the same option names as the other plugin, because if you set video URLs in the other plugin, they will also be used in this one.

Conclusion

Adding a video to the admin dashboard is really a very clever and useful way to help people getting a documentation of a WordPress installation. Using a platform like YouTube or Vimeo, you probably want to make sure that those (individual) videos are not listed or limited to a specific domain (e.g. with Vimeo Pro).

So, how do you offer documentation to WordPress installations? Do you also use (hosted) videos, another type of WordPress documentation plugin or an external documentation tool?