Joost de Valk has taken notice that there may be a large amount of plugins who’s setting pages in the newly redesigned WordPress back end will look awful. Joost is currently working on redoing all of his own plugins so they look good in the admin panel and has published a post which explains what he found in his research. The post goes over details such as the Wrapper, Headings, Individual Settings, and Submit Buttons.
For all of you plugin authors out there, be sure to check out the WordPress 2.5 Plugin Settings Pages Style Guide. If you are looking to migrate your theme or plugin to WordPress 2.5, check out this article on the WordPress Codex.
For credit sake, Jennifer Hodgdon was responsible for a good portion of the Codex article on Migrating Plugins and Themes.
Good catch on his part. I hope that WordPress 2.5 and going forward, there will be a standard by which old plugins won’t break as easily — giving them a much longer lifespan.
I found in my biggest plugin that it looks just as good in WordPress s2.5 as WordPress 2.3 with only one change — it uses the main-part as well as a side bar, so they had to be put into two separate table cells, but nothing else had to change.
If you plugin looked good and was modeled after the default WP pages, you shouldn’t have any trouble. It is especially easy if you styled it using the dbx boxes.
I clicked the WordPress 2.5 Plugin Settings Pages Style Guide link but it doesn’t work for me. It opens in a new tab and I receive an error of “Error establishing a database connection.”
Maybe it is temporary but thought I’d post this in case others have problems connecting to that link.
I’ve written an updated version of a style guide on my blog at http://epicalex.com/wordpress-.....yle-guide/ – it lists all the possible inputs that can be used, and gives examples.