Deconstructed WP admin theme

WordPress has been a helpful tool. Love it, hate it - it’s free, flexible and approachable by average joe web developers who don’t really write programs (me). There’s much about it I don’t love, but I use it often. One thing that bothers me each time I install it: the default admin theme. I like the look of the WP-Tiger theme better, but it feels less responsive to me (probably because of client-side layout redrawing?). What I’ve really wanted is something super quick to install (a plugin-based theme), something responsive and based on the initial layout, but much cleaner/simpler.

So I’ve made a new admin theme (wp-admin-nate.zip 8K), like WP, it’s free to use and repurpose. All I’ve done here is stripped out the hideous teal color, made all the fonts sans-serif, eliminated the tab-styling and excessive bordering/shadows. The navigation is still tab based, but uses a simple yellow-highlighter approach instead.

You’ll see how simple it is when you crack it open - feel free to modify and post alternate versions in the comments to this page. The upload interface is not modified - that interface is run through an iframe, and is harder (if even possible) to target with CSS only modifications.

To install it, just throw the unzipped folder into your plugins directory (wp-content/plugins/) then activate it in the admin tool. It’ll show up as “Nate’s Admin Style”, but you can rename it by editing the wp-admin-nate.php file.

Unfortunately I can’t offer support for this admin theme, but please feel free to leave comments, post updated versions, etc in the comments to this post.