Updated April 1st - Fluency 1.1 has been released, it is highly recommended that you upgrade at your convenience. Enjoy.
Overview
Despite the huge overhaul that the WordPress admin interface has received its still not quite what I would really like. I had grown quite attached to the Tiger Admin theme by Steve Smith and when I found that it didn’t work with WP2.5 I was a little disappointed. But this gave me the opportunity to do something different, my own admin theme. Fluency is the result.
Features
- As of v1.1 it is fully compatible with the stable release of WordPress 2.5
- Super easy installation.
- Smooth grey color scheme (no more blue)
- Menus rearranged, main menus down left, sub menus across the top
- WordPress 2.5+ only
- Support for several popular plugins including Ozh’s Admin Drop Down menus and NextGEN Gallery. Find out more.
- Screenshots are at the bottom of this page, or you can view them at flickr.
- Note: Fluency only works with CSS2 compliant browsers (Firefox and Safari - and IE8!) at the moment. If you are using IE you can still activate Fluency, it just won’t do anything. If you’re desperate for IE compatibility (IE7 compatibility coming soon), maybe you should consider donating.
Download and Installation
It really doesn’t get much easier than this, just download the zip file (the link is at the top right of this page, after the jump for my feed readers), extract the contents and upload the whole ‘wp-admin-fluency’ folder to your plugins directory which you can find here:
[wordpress directory]/wp-content/plugins/[put fluency here]
Then go into your WordPress admin and go to the ‘plugins’ page, activate ‘Fluency Admin’ and you will instantly be using the theme. Easy as that.
The future
I will do my best to keep Fluency up-to-date with the latest stable version of WordPress. I’ve also got a couple of things in mind to make Fluency even better, and more customisable. But for the moment the main ‘updates’ will be support for additional plugins, to make sure that the plugin admin pages remain completely usable and inline with the rest of Fluency.
Plugin Support
In v1.1 I’ve added support for several more popular plugins including Ozh’z Admin Drop Down menus and NextGEN Gallery. For full details about plugin suport head over to the plugin compatibility page for Fluency.
In general if a plugin works in the standard admin it “should” work in Fluency. If not, don’t worry, I’ll do my best to add special support for it. If you have a plugin you would like to see supported then please let me know via the support forum or bug tracker.
Support
If you’ve got any questions about Fluency, you can leave a comment or better yet jump over to the support forum and I’ll do my best to help you out. I’ve also set up a bug tracker, so if you come across something that isn’t quite right post the bug and I’ll look into it.
Donations
Plugins don’t design and code themselves, they take precious time to build, test and support. So if you use and like Fluency Admin, or any of my other work, please consider a donation, there is a link at the top left of this page just below the download link. All donations are greatly appreciated.
Screenshots
Here are a selection of screenshots, click on them to view a full size version.
Dashboard
Create New Post
Manage Links
Manage Themes
Widgets
Writing Settings
Manage Plugins
Excellent stuff!
I’ve been using it for the past 48 hours and have found nothing to complain about thus far.
Certainly more (much more) pleasing on the eye than the standard 2.5 admin page. I hope those working on 2.5 (and beyond) might take some inspiration from what you’ve done here.
I’ve noticed there’s an option in WP2.5 to toggle admin styles from /wp-admin/profile.php. Do you know if this will support third-party admin themes, or do we need an entire plugin to enable it?
Looks like a great plugin, either way. :)
I think it was mentioned briefly on the wp-testers mailing list that it would be a ‘plugable’ function that would allow for plugins to add custom color schemes. I guess in theory it probably wouldn’t be limited to colors if all you are doing is including an additional style sheet (which is what Fluency does anyway). I might have a look around a bit later to see if I can find anything, since it may allow for (in the case of multi-user blogs) each user to choose whether to use Fluency or not, as opposed to making it the default for everyone.
Really very cool, congratulations.
When I first released my Admin Drop Down Menu I made it compatible with Tiger. I think I’m going to have a look at mutual compatibility between our two plugins.
Interesting plugin.
It would be worth cleaning all those OSX files out the download zip though.
And it would be good to see if you can integrate you theme into the new per-user theme selector using the hooks we added yesterday - feel free to open a ticket on trac if there are hooks missing that stop you integrating it the same way the other admin themes work.
Thanks for that, much more pleasing for the eye than the original design.
Just found one little problem: If there are too many entrys in the second menu level, it overlays with the header of the subpage.
Thank you very much for sharing. Great work.
Fantastic work! This should be the default admin theme ;-)
so cool :)
mmm took me a little to found the download link…
having to mouseover the links to findout that was the download link (has a .zip as url), isn’t great.
But nice them… i can’t wait to try this out… thanks!
Very nice! Great job.
Though when you have too many sub-menus (due to lots of plugins), layout doesn’t break very gracefully to the next line. Perhaps something you can fix in a future release.
Hi!
Plugin does not like german backend? Breaks in my backend…
Greetz
Very nice dude. There is some problem with sub menus display in firefox.
Great work you’ve done! I appreciate it!
This is pretty awesome! Will install it right away!
Fluency admin theme for WordPress is very nice! This is a very liked me. Thanks!
Beautiful work on the admin!
Where’s the DL link?
Never mind. Found it.
Sexy.
It’s a nice looking skin, but a couple of points:
1. Some of us set our browsers to have a minimum font size. Mine is 16px. The design breaks and doesn’t look all that hot in this design. Please consider using “em” instead of “px” in your CSS files. For padding and such.
2. More importantly, your theme does not really improve too much on the regular Wordpress mistake, which is that if I want to go to, say, Theme Editor, I need two painful clicks: first “Presentation”, and then “Theme Editor”. You were redesigning the interface, so you could easily include some onmouseover events that would show the submenus on WP admin menus. Without it, your theme is like that of WP-Tiger (another nice looking theme but not quite useful in any real sense).
Thanks for the work, and if you edit it in the future to be friendly with WP 2.5 and above, please drop me a note.
Great work though the style doesn’t seem to work well under Safari and Firefox 3 Beta 4(The top sub navigation bar is invisible).
Yeah, but I have a feeling that if I change every thing to ems its only going to break things more, sure everything will scale nicely, but keeping certain elements where I want them might become difficult. That said I’ll have a look and see if I can at least make sure that it doesn’t break too badly when you change font sizes.
But this is not the purpose, or function, of Fluency. I am ONLY playing with the styles, and if a submenu is not there in the code, I can’t magically make it appear with CSS. Perhaps this is something that could be addressed in a future version, or with an additional plugin, but its not (and never was) the intention of this plugin.
Not sure what you mean? It is ‘friendly’ with WP2.5 and above now… because that was the point of it in the first place…
Its working absolutely fine in my Safari 3, not sure about FF3 but can’t see why it wouldn’t. What version of WP are you running. If you could post this in the forum or the bug tracker that would be fantastic.
The screenshots look amazing.
I installed it on my 2.5 test installation on my Mac and it looks a little funny.
Here’s a screenshot: http://creativeburst.org/wp-admin.png
Thanks for posting the screenshot. I know that the WordPress guys are still changing bits and pieces so depending on when you downloaded your version of WP2.5 there might be things that have changed in the styles, hence the reason that Fluency has ‘broken’ a little. The current version was tested upto the 11-03-08 nightly build.
I’m still testing and once the final release of WP2.5 is out I’ll be updating Fluency to make sure it works with any changes that they’ve made.
This is fantastic! Matt & Co still have a couple of days to sneak this in to 2.5 :)
sorry, but my english is a little poor. I would like to try this theme, but it was a failure. (I registrated on wordpress, but I didn’t find the ‘plugins’ page.)
How should I try this?
Great work…
Verrrry nice admin theme! Congratulations and thanks!
Great work! This really is a candidate for being the official theme in my opinion. The upcoming default 2.5 one really is uninspiring on every level, while this is something quite different and fresh.
Keep pushing and working on this as you may make some serious impact with this. It retains the WordPress feel (nice big text used for post titles and whatnot), but is different and gives it a new character at the same time.
BTW, any idea what the cross-browser support is like? One huge failing of past custom admin interfaces AND the official admin interface has always been this area — they all look pretty different or don’t work at all between browsers. It’d be great if yours had a level of quality that ensures almost the same look in all browsers.
Thank you Dean for the support of my postratings =D
Elegant!
thank you for your hard work~
Very nice. It would be even better if it had accordion (or similar) menus.
One thing to note: the position of the save/submit button side bar on the edit post page is fixed, but that menu is pluggable, so it is possible for it to become to become longer than the page.
When testing one of my plugins, (future posts calendar) this happens very quickly.
see my previous comments
no worries, figured it was a good starting point.
While is it beyond the intention of this plugin, it is something I have considered…
Ah, ok, I wasn’t actually aware of that. I’ll download you future posts plugin tonight and see what I can work out, might need to un-fix the sidebar…
I tested Fluency using WP beta 03-17-2008, OSX 10.5 and the latest version of Safari. The admin panel you have designed looks amazing.
One error I noticed in the location “Write > Post > Write Post” is that the Publish Status sidebar incorrectly displays the publish immediately text. The text runs too far to the left and overlaps the checkbox. Not sure why that happens since the “Keep this post private” text displays perfectly with its checkbox.
That error aside I’m spoiled already with the theme. Can’t wait for the final release and updates. I’ll report back what I can to help you fix/discover the bugs.
Keep up the great work!
A second issue that I’m finding is that on the Admin pages, when one of the top level menus has extra submenus (on the manage tab this means only three or four added by plugins) it creates a lot of display bugs.
wordpress.org says : The latest stable release of WordPress (Version 2.3.3)
Where can I download 2.5 or 2.5+ version of wordpress?
thx
You can get a beta version from the SVN, or by joining the testers mailing list at wordpress.org. However, WP2.5 is expected to be released in the next couple of days so you can hold off until then if you wish.
Thank you Dean. Great work! Keep it up! :)
Here’s an idea… get them to use THIS for the native Admin theme!
I look forward to testing this out tonight, because the screenshots are fantastic!
Gorgeous. I will be installing this as soon as I can upgrade my site.
I have installed this plugin on two separate sandbox sites on different servers running WP 2.5b1. After I activated the plugin, NOTHING HAPPENED. I still have the same admin layout as before.
I am running the latest nightly build of WP2.5b1.
What am I doing wrong?
I just regret losing the plugin My Dashboard, which is and awesome plugin, that makes thinks much clearer and better to use.
Anyway, nice admin theme!
I cannot seem to get this to work as easy as the install is either. :/ I activated it and its a no go.
there is a graphical error when i try to add media (image in particular)
have a good day
Are you using Internet Explorer? If so, you won’t see the theme.
Thanks I’ll look into it.
It took me LITERALLY 5 minutes to find the download link on this page! Please consider placing a second link in the body of the text!
I’m using the Wordpress 2.5 RC and the Fluency Admin.
It’s a nice Job, very nice.
The Administrative Panel was much more intuitive.
Very nice admin theme, can’t wait to try it with the final WP 2.5 ! :)
found a bug with ur plugin and RC1.
when u have fluency activated and try to add images to your site with that “add media” lightbox menu, the navigation row gets distorted.
regards
I’m using Wordpress 2.5 RC and the Fluency Admin : i can’t use widget / design on safari 3.1 and firefox Mac 10.5
Nice theme!! It works like a charm.
Just a few bugs in the display with FF2 though ; I can email you screenshots.
Thanks thanks thanks!
Nice theme, I will use it once 2.5 is final
Hello,
I tested your (very beautiful !) fluency theme on a test installation of WP 2.5 RC1. But I have this error message when displaying the dashboard (other pages in the admin interface work without any problem):
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: wp_register_sidebar_widget() in /homepages/18/d185394197/htdocs/wp25/wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php on line 31
Any idea ??
Thanks in advance ! Sylvain
Great! I will use it with the final WP 2.5 Thank you so much!
That function is not used anywhere in Fluency, so its most likely being caused by another plugin that you are using. Do any of the plugins that you’re using add things to the dashboard? (kind of like how Akismet adds spam stats)
Ok as easy as you wrote it is to install, I couldn’t get it to work. I am running 2.5-RC1.1… I uploaded it in the plugin folder clicked activated and nothing happens..
Wondering why is that
What browser are you using?…
its better than happycogs theme. great work.
Internet explorer 7.0
OK since you said about the browser, I went ahead and activated via Firefox latest version, and it works in FF, but doesn’t work in IE 7.0
hi dean,
it really looks fantastic but i can not understand how those people had installed it on their wordpress. because i did the same thing like they did put it in wp-content\plugins\wp-admin-fluency folder then activated it from admin plugins page (see screenshot-2) but nothing changed in admin panel visualisation.
I thought my wordpress version is wrong and installed the latest version (development version (2.5-RC1)) and retried using plugin but again nothing changed.
Is there anything wrong with me?
Please just checkout these screenshots. Thanks.
Blog Version: http://www.ozgurkelimeler.com/upload/screenshot_1.jpg
Plugins Page: http://www.ozgurkelimeler.com/upload/screenshot_2.jpg
Directory Screenshot: http://www.ozgurkelimeler.com/upload/screenshot_3.jpg
A nooby to WordPress - but I keep seeing mentions of the Presentation menu (and I have seen it before in the WP menu (we updated to have a look see at the beta WP2.5 - using your great Fleuncy Dean - thanks) - but I see no Presentation menu item on my UI…curious
Hi dean (again),
It seems that problem only occurs in ie. Because when i launched the wp-admin in firefox, everything was great. So how can we make it compatible and useable with ie7?
thanks.
The ‘presentation’ menu is now the ‘design’ menu in WP2.5
At the moment IE is not supported (I probably should mention this somewhere above), mainly because IE does not support a lot of the CSS2 thats being used by Fluency. I will look at “fixing” compatibility for IE in the future. Until then, I would recommend using Firefox or Safari.
Hi, any chance to get the current OZH-integrated code before the release of 2.5? I’m building a 2.5 site on my localhost that will go live after the update, and I’ll definitely include the OZH menu, and I’m considering fluency. So I’d like to iron out problems, and tweak the CSS as soon as possible… thanks for consideration - and thanks for the work!
I’d like to echo Tobias’s request for a 1.1 release ASAP. I’m not afraid of bugs or rough edges, and I love your interface, but I can’t live without OZH.
The newly updated MyFtp plug-in partially breaks using Fluency where the MyFtp admin screen is cutoff on the top and left prohibiting full usage.
I just switched over to WP and immediately downloaded the WP 2.5 version. I had just spent 7 weeks using the WP.com backend and got used to it. This newer version is annoying that there’s so much stuff that’s counterintuitive in the layout.
I read about your plugin on Smashing and the screen shots sold me. I just installed it, but haven’t actually used it yet, but I was sold on the first screen, just seeing all my options in one space. Now, if only it came in blue. ;P
Great Great Great. I love it!
i’am looking forward to 1.1 with the OZH support. i love it more and more every day.
Thank you!
Will it run with IE8 in the future? I can’t use Firefox at work.
Thanks a lot for this :)
Looks fine on Firefox on the stable 2.5 :D
Suddenly wordpress admin panel has started looking more professional and sophisticated….specially by the colors :)
Keep it up !
This theme is just amazing looking. I updated to 2.5 today and regreted it right after i did it becouse my “black spotmilk” admin theme wouldnt work and i was forced to use the default wordpress admin theme. i know they did alot of work to change it and make it better but it still has that same old “wordpress admin” feel and look to it.
The only thing i see wrong with this is is its based on css2. wich when ie-8 comes out shouldnt be a big problem.
great look though and thanks for the theme
love it
for me it doesn’t work!
what am i doing wrong?
i have copied the fluency folder in the plugins folder…i have activate it but still the same blue interface is showing