Adding Notes, Reminders and Instructions to WordPress

Sticking virtual Post-it notes on your WordPress admin dashboard, posts, pages, and widgets is a great way to leave messages for other users on your site or add personal reminders. Here are some noteworthy plugins you’ll want to stick with…

Whether you blog alone or manage a multi-author site, being able to stick virtual Post-it notes and messages around your WordPress site is a great way to share important instructions and store your ideas and reminders.

Stick’em on Your Backend, Frontend, and Everywhere in Between…

In this post, we take a look at these free WordPress notes plugins to help you stay organized and keep track of everything in all areas of your site:

WP Dash Notes (add sticky notes to Dashboard)
Dashboard Notes (add notices to Dashboard)
Plugin Notes Plus (add notes to Plugins)
User Notes (add notes to User Profiles)
WordPress offers a better way to share notes with your team and users. (Source: The Office)

Let’s get stuck into it…

1. WP Dash Notes

WP Dash Notes – WordPress sticky notes plugin.

WP Dash Notes is a sticky notes plugin for WordPress that lets you add private notes to your dashboard or share notes on other users’ dashboards.

Add colored notes to your dashboard with WP Dash Notes.

Similar to the first plugin described earlier,  you can add multiple notes, create lists, and choose the note’s background (plus text color).

WP Dash Notes, however, also gives you the option to specify target user roles and/or the users themselves, add images, allow comments to be added to notes, and notify the recipients by email when new notes are posted.

You can send email alerts when adding new notes.

Visit the plugin page for more details: WP Dash Notes

2. Dashboard Notes

Dashboard Notes plugin for WordPress.

Dashboard Notes lets you add simple notices with notes and instructions for clients and specific user roles.

Display a dashboard notice on all the admin pages of selected user roles.

If you feel a little confused about how to add a note after installing the plugin, it’s done via the Widgets screen.

The plugin lets you add notices to your dashboard that match the style of WordPress Dashboard notifications.

Are these notifications from WordPress or from a WordPress plugin?

Note: At the time of testing, this plugin wasn’t quite up-to-date with the new “block-style” changes introduced to the Widgets screen – I couldn’t do some of the things the plugin describes as allowing us to do (e.g. choose the color of the notification, whether or not to include a logo, and exactly what pages to include the notification on using simple URL matching). Hopefully, the developers will soon fix this, as this one looks to be quite a useful little plugin.

Go here for more details: Dashboard Notes

If you like the idea of adding notes to areas of your site other than the dashboard, here are a few more free notes plugins for WordPress you might be interested in that deliver similar functionality, in slightly different ways.

3. Plugin Notes Plus

Plugin Notes Plus

Plugin Notes Plus lets you add notes in your Plugins screen about your plugins. This is a useful plugin if you need to provide information or a warning to clients on why a plugin was installed, or notes to the admin on how or where the plugin is being used.

Add notes in your Plugins screen.

The “Plus” of Plugin Notes Plus is that you can quickly add more than just notes. This plugin also lets you insert notes with icons for warnings, links, information, checkmarks, etc.

Add different icons with your notes.

This plugin lets you add all kinds of useful notes about your plugins.

Add useful notes about your plugins.

Visit the plugin site here: Plugin Notes Plus

4. User Notes

User Notes

User Notes adds a text editor area to each User Profile allowing Administrators to keep private notes about each user.

It also adds a column to the list of users in the User screen, so admins can quickly view notes without having to visit user profiles.

User Notes ads a Notes column to the Users screen.

If you run an eCommerce or Membership site, this plugin can be quite handy, as it allows you to add notes about each individual customer or member.

Keep notes about your users.

Go here for more info: User Notes

And On That Final Note…

The WP Dashboard Notes plugin is eye-catching in terms of design and note appearance. However, if you want to display notes in more locations than just the dashboard, consider using one of the other free notes plugins described above to customize your WordPress dashboard and add personal reminders, instructions for editors, authors, and co-authors, and information for your clients after handing over a website.