WP Admin Area Options

April 21, 2008 | Filed under: Around the Web, Downloads

If you’ve already upgraded to WordPress 2.5, then you know that 2.5 brings a BIG change to the admin area. Automattic worked with a team from Happy Cog Studios to redesign the admin area for greater ease and usability. However, while this improvement may help users new to WordPress, people used to the old admin area may be having some issues acclimating to the new interface. In fact some “power users” downright hate it. While that’s a perfectly valid point of view, I consider myself a power user, and I actually really like the new interface. That’s not to say I love everything about it, though.

The great thing about WordPress and it’s big, wonderful community is that if there is something you are dissatisfied with, there’s probably someone else out there just like you. Unlike you, they may know how to write a plugin or a hack to fix it. In the past few weeks I’ve come across several of these fixes and I thought I’d highlight them.

For those completely dissatisfied with the new admin, Dean J Robinson has created a redesign of this own. It’s definitely in the vein of the no longer working (in 2.5) Tiger Admin theme, so if you liked that, you’ll like his Fluency Admin theme. Please note that this theme only works in 2.5 and only in CSS2 compliant browsers like Firefox and Safari. People using IE7 or below are out of luck (but you shouldn’t be using IE anyway). Otherwise, using this admin theme is as simple as installing a plugin, just upload to your plugins folder and activate.

UPDATE: I just found another admin theme plugin called Leopard Admin inspired by the look of Mac OSX Leopard.

Speaking of plugins how about the Baltic Amber Admin Theme and Schemes plugin. This nice little plugin uses the new color scheme switcher in 2.5 and gives you a bunch of new color options as well as letting you define your own colors or even have your admin colors change randomly. This is a great little plugin if you ever wanted your admin area to match the colors of your design (or any other colors you fancy). He also provides a few usability updates such as reducing the vertical space at the top of the admin area and updating the “Write” page layout a bit.

UPDATE 2: Easy Admin Color Schemes seems to be in a similar vein as above, though it looks to have a lot more freedom for changing colors and even CSS if you want.

For those that have large monitors and bigger than 1024×768 resolutions you may have noticed that 2.5 introduced a max-width to the admin area which makes for a big gaping hole of wasted space on the right side your screen. Luckily, there’s the Remove Max Width plugin that does away with this.

On a related note, there are some that are really unhappy with the new layout of the “Write” pages. Specifically, that categories and other post/page options have been moved underneath the post box instead of at the side where those things used to be. This means you have to do a lot more scrolling up and down the page than you used to. Judy at Persisent Illusion was so annoyed by this that she created a hack to fix it. If this is an issue with you, too, please go by her thread on the ideas board and vote for it so that maybe the WP people will fix this in subsequent versions.

I, personally, had the same issue as Judy and was delighted to find this hack, however there were a few things that I didn’t like about it. Specifically there was some uneven spacing issues that nagged my OCD as well as the fact that I wanted to keep tags underneath the post box (also I don’t think it worked in IE6, not that I really care, but it could be an issue for some). I also wanted to have the same fix on the links page. I took Judy’s hack and fixed those things for myself. I also made it slightly less hacky by making a plugin (using the above Remove Max Width plugin as the base) to overwrite the CSS changes instead of having to overwrite the admin CSS files. I’ve decided to release my update to the public. Please note that this is still very much a HACK. Meaning that you have to overwrite a few core files, which is generally a no-no since it makes upgrading harder. But for people comfortable using FTP and upgrading WordPress on your own it’s a very simple fix.

Here’s some screenshots for those interested:

Download

Using WP 2.5: Download here

Using WP 2.5.1: Download here

Instructions

edit-form-advanced.php, edit-page-form.php, edit-pages.php and edit-link-form.php go in your wp-admin folder (overwrite old files)
restore-write-sidebar.php goes in your plugins folder
Activate in your admin under Plugins

Notes

All credit for these goes to Judy for her hack and Dion Hulse who wrote the Remove Max Width plugin. I just added some stuff to both of these and combined them.

Please please please back up those files before you overwrite them, use this at your own risk, I can’t provide support for everyone, blah blah blah. I’ve only tested this in Firefox, IE6 and IE7. I will tell you right here and now that this hack does not look as good in IE as it does in Firefox (why are you still using IE?).

Also, it goes without saying that since this is hacking some core WP files that this won’t work in conjunction with the above mentioned Fluency Admin theme or Baltic Amber Themes and Schemes plugin. But if you are unhappy with the new admin area you now have about 4 5 6 different options you can try out and hopefully you will find something you like better.