Create And Share WP Admin Themes

Recently, I wrote an article on WeblogToolsCollection.com entitled Create Your Own Admin Color Scheme which described how to create your own Admin color scheme for WordPress 2.5 by using a plugin called Easy Admin Color Schemes. One of the features that I thought this plugin was missing was the ability to share the designs that user’s created. The plugin author is interested in adding this functionality to the plugin, but I’ve recently stumbled across a website which seems to do just this called WP Admin Themes.com

This site allows you to easily create a color scheme for the WordPress backend. Clicking on the CREATE A THEME link takes you to the theme generator page which is nicely laid out. What’s cool about this process is that, you can click on the sections of the 2.5 administration area within a screenshot. This will automatically select the text field which corresponds to that section so you can configure a hexadecimal color code. Then, you can click on the preview button and see a live preview of the changes as they would look on your blog.

Here is what my color scheme looked like after I configured it through the generator. This website even gives you the option to download the color scheme you just created. Inside the downloaded file is a folder called palette. Within this directory lyes three files, the css file, the php file and the png file. The css file contains the color scheme, the php file is the plugin you will need to upload to your plugin directory and then activate if you want to use the color scheme and the png file is a screenshot of your color palette. Pretty darn nifty if I must say so myself. This is like the Easy Admin Color Scheme plugin tied into a webpage with the ability to share your creations easily.

I do have some suggestions though for the website. First, the color codes on the final product should be shown underneath the color, and not have that color as the background because sometimes the color code is too hard to read. I’ll give you an example.

Notice how the font of the color code and the actual color makes it difficult to read.

I wouldn’t mind this site having a registration page so that I could log in to an account, manage my admin color schemes and edit them if need be. As it stands now, once you create your color scheme, you are unable to go back and edit the colors. I really think this site could create it’s own little community if the registration features were added and a bit of social networking were thrown in. It looks to me like the creator of this site was or is a fan of ColourLovers.com which is an awesome color palette site by the way, but I feel ColourLovers makes an excellent example of what I’d like to see WP-AdminThemes.com become. Nothing fancy, just the ability to comment on schemes, rate them, and have an area for most popular, most commented on, and most downloads.

All in all, this website/service practically takes the hard work of the Easy Admin Color Schemes plugin and turns it into a web service. However, I do enjoy the fact that the Easy Admin Color Scheme plugin gives you access to the entire CSS structure which makes up the Administration panel, giving you more granularity to change things to your liking. This makes the plugin aspect more advanced, but it also gives you the chance to do so much more with the look and feel of the backend than what the website offers, which only concentrates on the color aspect of the design, and there are only so many colors that go with each other.