So for about the past three months my WordPress Dashboard was completely gone. I swear, everytime I clicked the Dashboard link to the left all  I got was a big white area to the left. It wasn’t that big a deal or I would have worked on fixing it months ago but … it was annoying so this morning I sat down at my computer and fixed it completely by accident.

It seems that the WordPress Dashboard is subordinate to the index.php file located in your /plugins/ directory. How’d I figure that out? As part of my desire to secure my own blog a little more, I placed a blank index.php file in there months ago but this morning I decided to be a bit of a smart ass and change it to automatically tell people to stop looking there … worked perfectly until I clicked the Dashboard tool in WP and was told to stop trying to look at my dashboard which made me look at the URL for the Dashboard link with was index.php?page=index.php. 

So … long (and fairly dull story short) … placing an index.php file in your plugin folder will over ride your wp-admin dashboard, but an index.html file will tell people to politely stop looking at your code.