Two Color Schemes For The 2.5 Dashboard

This is actually quite interesting. I upgraded WordPress from one nightly build to another (one night later), and it looked completely different! A dark shade of blue, instead of a really light shade. I was shocked!

As far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to change the WP-Admin theme currently. But, I am running one day behind.

Just in case anyone hasn’t seen the new default WP 2.5 color scheme, take a look at this screenshot.

Okay, I spoke too soon. I just updated to the latest nightly build, and voila. On your profile page in wp-admin, there’s an option to change the admin theme.

Take a look.

I was horrified to see the dark blue. I thought they had sold out, but then found there was a personal option to change it.

Shame the dark blue seems to be the default.

If there is a system in place to use two colours it should be easy to use a plugin to add more.

As far as I can tell, there won’t be a nice and simple way to change the admin theme to another style (unless you just overwrite colors-fresh.css or colors-classic.css manually) without the use of a plugin. There isn’t any sort of admin theme ‘meta data’ like there is with regular themes.

Plus — the actual styling of the admin themes is delt with in one single stylesheet (for each part of the admin, like login.css, install.css, etc, not install-classic.css), only the colors stylesheet is different. So those themes like the Tiger Style Administration one (which apparently doesn’t work with 2.5) probably won’t get the opportunity to change the layout without the use of a seperate plugin. :/

Maybe this feature will make its way into the final release, but for now, it looks like we’ll need a plugin for more admin themes.

Just in case anyone’s interested in digging through the admin stylesheets in 2.5, and is too lazy to download the nightly build, you can see the various admin stylesheets here: http://chris24.ca/wp-admin/css/ (publicly accessible)

The “classic” theme has the color scheme of the original WP administration (but I think the colors seem a bit off..), but still the same design.

Here’s a comparison shot. (warning: very large image)

Ozh has created a sample plugin here:

http://planetozh.com/blog/2008/03/per-user-custom-stylesheet-in-wordpress-25/

I downloaded it and changed a few things then I copied the the classic.css and begin adding my own colors. The best thing is removing the dashboard widgets using this plugin. I think this will definitely lead to people creating more advanced plugins where everything can just be customized using a built in editor.

[...] Two Colors Schemes For The 2.5 Dashboard [...]

[...] going to be at least two color schemes available for use as soon as WordPress 2.5 is downloaded (source) plus additional plugins or stylesheets from developers. This is good news for the people who [...]