In my wordpress theme I have a widget called Meta. I have put it in my side bar, but I have no idea what it does and if I actually need it.
Can someone explain it to me? Thanks. 
Maria
What is meta?
(6 posts) (3 voices)
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The Meta section includes some admin links like "Login" or "XHTML Valid." These are useful to the owner of a blog, they add no value for the reader.
You can remove the Meta coding by logging into your WordPress blog, go to Appearance, select Editor, and go to the Sidebar which is listed on the right hand side. You can delete the coding. Hope this helped.
Posted 6 months ago # -
Yeah, it helped. Thank you.
One of the words on my Meta section is 'site admin' and when I clicked it, I went back to my dashboard. I can see how that is handy, specially as I am at the moment still setting things up and am going backwards and forwards all the time.
I am asuming that a visitor to my site can't click on it. I wouldn't want them to end up on my dashboard.So far I have stayed away from the editor and code as I am way to scared I will do something wrong. Luckily I found a theme that has a step-by-step guide on how to customize it. Very handy.
Posted 6 months ago # -
You're lucky to have a theme that gives you instructions! Most of the themes don't provide instruction or if they do, they're not very explicit.
Posted 6 months ago # -
Rebecca's instructions are correct if a Theme has the Meta section hard-coded in the sidebar, some Themes use a Widget, in which case you go to Appearance > Widgets and just drag it out of the sidebar.
Dutchie, your site visitors CAN click on it, but they'll be presented with the Login screen - they'd have to have ( or guess or hack ) a login & password to get into your site admin.
The way I handle it is to be logged in to my site admin in one tab (or window) and then have my site's front end open in another tab or window.
If you're the only author on a site, you don't really need the link to Login, unless you like it - I just have my login screen bookmarked in my browser toolbar....but on multi-author blogs it's nice to give other authors an easy shortcut to log in.
Removing it doesn't prevent people from getting to your login screen - if they really want to (maliciously or not), it's easy to do by going to your site and adding /wp-login.php to the end of the address (or if your WP is installed in a subfolder such as /Blog adding it to the end of that). Bad folks and robots already know this, so removing it doesn't protect you.
I remove it because there are more important things I want to have in my sidebar, but it's a personal preference....
Posted 6 months ago # -
I am lucky that I have a Meta widget for my sidebar, so it is easy to remove.
I understand that it could be a bit 'dangerous' to leave it in the sidebar, but I have found it handy to use when designing my site. I think I will remove it once the bulk of the designing is done.
As you say Trisha, I probably could find more important things to put in my sidebar.Rebecca: Yes, I was very lucky to stumble across the theme among the 1100 themes available on wordpress. I can recomment it to anyone who feels they need some extra help. It's called Suffusion and it is completely customizable, including the colours. It's great!
Posted 6 months ago #
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