If you wish to add a widget to your WordPress dashboard then that’s a different, and longer, discussion. Instead I’m going to show you how to add a simple message, of your choosing, to the “Right Now” box.

How could you use this? You could use a database lookup beforehand, for instance, to report on useful blog/theme information. I’m using it right now to report on how my competition is running – I’m performing a count on the table and reporting the output back (see image to the right).

First of all, you need to add an action for activity_box_end pointing to your new function. All of the code discussed here should be put in your theme’s functions.php file. In this example I’m pointing it to a function named show_admin_message…

add_action('activity_box_end','show_admin_message');

Within your function you then simply need to output the HTML. Here’s a complete piece of code that you can use…

add_action('activity_box_end','show_admin_message');

function show_admin_message() {
   $output_text = "Put your output message here";
   echo '<div style="border: 1px solid #ffd700; margin: 10px 0 0; padding: 5px; background: #ffffba; color: #000;">'.= __($output_text).'</div>';
}

This will display the text “Put your output message here” in a yellow box, with a darker yellow border. The text will be in black.