custom home page, category and forum dashboards/widgets

Good news. You can now customize what you see on three pages - the home page, category list and forum pages! You've been able to hide the category list on the left for ages. Now you can control the other columns too!

What should you expect to see?

Role	What you should see
Non-logged in user	No dashboard customization
Logged in user	On the home page, category page and forum page, you'll see a pull down that lets you choose from a list of views. In your user profile, you'll see the same list of views so you can choose a default. You'll also see a link from your user profile to create your own custom dashboard to use as the view. You can even choose a different default dashboard for any of the three levels.
Pie user	Everything a logged in user can see plus the ability to share your custom dashboards with others
Moderator	Everything a pie user can see plus the ability to have the shared dashboard be owned by "Admin" instead of a given user. Make it more official like. Also can edit the dashboards of others.
Site admins	Everything moderators have plus the ability to see and edit a list of all dashboards anyone has created.

A bit on terminology
Dashboard - a combination of elements and attributes that you can use on the page. Also known as view. We offer three types of views - the home page, category list and forum list.
Widget - one of the columns in a dashboard

Building a dashboard
A dashboard consists of 1-4 columns. For each column, you have some choices:

Which widget to show

The width of the column (The dashboard is smart enough to make sure your column widths add up to 100%.)

A parameter (for some widgets). For example, you can choose how many days of data to go back for some widgets

For the most part, the columns are independent of each other. If you create a dashboard that has all four widgets set to the list of recent topics, it'll look bad - but it will work. For legacy reasons, there are a couple of widgets that interact on the default dashboards.

Q&A
Why can moderators edit my dashboards?
Because we can. Seriously though, maybe there is an issue with the name of the view. Or we are getting rid of a custom widget. Or anything really. Don't worry. We have better things to do than mess with your dashboards.

How do I request another widget for the dashboard
Post your idea in the ranch office

If I have a dashboard set in my profile and choose a different one on the home page/category/forum page, what happens?
The next time you re-load the page, it will use your default one. Unless you explicitly change your default dashboard, you are just seeing the other view temporarily.

Why don't you have validation that views don't have the same names?
For private dashboards, you can name the dashboard anything you want. It'll only confuse you if you choose the same name as a shared dashboard. Since only moderators and pie users can create shared views, we hope there won't be duplication. If someone wants to pie for pie and create confusing shared views, we can still edit them to avoid the confusion. And add validation at that point. It seems like something that is unlikely to be an issue.