Back in June, we discovered a plug-in that provided a new look for the WordPress dashboard. Some people liked the way it looked (like John Chow), while others preferred the default layout offered by the WordPress team. Up until now, those have been the only two major options when it came to your WordPress 2.0+ blog. But times have changed.

We want to customize everything these days and the two existing layouts leave very little for you in terms of personalization. Kenneth Dickson of InvestorBlogger has been experimenting with a couple of plug-ins that allow you to customize the WordPress Dashboard to suit your preferences: Dashboard Editor and MyDashboard. Based on his experiences, the latter appears to be more powerful.

With the MyDashboard WordPress plugin (which you can download here), the WordPress Dashboard is effectively transformed into something that looks almost like the iGoogle Personalized Homepage. The Dashboard is broken down into three columns and your choice of “gadgets” can be clicked and dragged to whatever location you like. Default gadgets include things like latest comments, blog statistics, incoming links, scheduled posts, and Akismet statistics. If you are so inclined, you can also make your own gadgets for MyDashboard.

Seems like an interesting proposition for anyone looking to customize WordPress further. Ah, the beauty of an open platform.