The most requested search item on this blog is “WordPress admin themes”. With variations of the various search terms, I would guess that we receive many hundreds of hits a day on just this blog from WordPress enthusiasts looking for themes to adorn their admin panel with. A simple search on Google reveals an old post from this blog listing 9 admin themes (I don’t link to it because most of the themes listed are dead or deprecated). Here is a list of nice admin themes that I can find, which are still being produced and regularly updated.
- Fluency Admin by Dean J. Robinson. A nice looking, well documented, well translated admin theme that is often updated.
Wait for it ….. thats it!! (that I could find, please let us know if you know of others that are of high quality and updated regularly) There are various useful and popular tools to control and modify your admin interface such as Ozh’s Admin Drop Down Menu or the Adminimize Plugin, however no admin theme market has developed. The initial momentum seems to have fizzled out. We feature hundreds of themes for your WordPress blog every month. I barely ever see one for the admin side.
It really sucks to know that there is such a demand for these, but no supply whatsoever. To encourage talented developers and feed this need in the WordPress community, I would like to offer up our services for what they are worth. If you create, build and support a high quality admin theme (we decide what is high quality) for WordPress and release it under the GPL as appropriate, we will let you feature your admin theme and your design services on this blog for our readers. Think of it as free advertising in exchange for some service to the community. (Please leave a comment or use the contact form linked above if you need clarification or have questions.)
Are you interested?
We noticed the same so developed the Easy Blogging Admin theme.
Of course, it’s not available for free though :/ But it should be a lot cheaper very soon as an individual download (rather than having a full membership)
I have noticed more people interested in White Labeling. There is a plugin for that and code snippets for the functions.php to White Label your own backend.
However, I do agree, there should be more options for users wanting a different WordPress admin panel.
Wow, that’s are really nice admin theme. I home more people will go that path in the future. But that will require simplification of admin themeifiying for sure.
This is a goldfield waiting to be tapped and I think this post might just unleash a flood of activity. Hoping I get off my rear end enough to capitalize on it as well!
I think one of the key problems is supporting the continuously updated nature of wordpress. It’s tiring supporting a free product and updating it each time wp releases another version.
WordPress killed admin themes when they decided it would be a good idea to redesign the backend every other release. End of story. Who was going to put unpaid time into learning to manipulate twenty-odd pages of admin (not to mention plugin settings pages) if six months later they were going to have to do it all again?
I am really glad Fluency is still around, though. It made 2.0 usable for me, and for that I am forever grateful.
Fluency looks awesome. Probably much easier for making quick changes
Not necessarily a theme, but it neatens up my admin and provides a nice bit of color.
Ozh’s admin dropdown menu: http://planetozh.com/blog/my-p.....-down-css/
I think these have not been created for a while (there used to be one called tiger something? Among others) due to how good WP looks these days.
If so many people are after one, I will make one when I have time… but what is it they want? I love the current theme of WP3.0.
Just because it looks good, does not mean that people do not want a variety.
Adminimize not Adminize 🙂
Fixed. Thanks for the catch.