Updated August 23rd — Fluency 1.2.1 has been released, this fixes the display issues for the “press this” screen in WordPress 2.6. 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
- As of v1.2 it is fully compatible with the stable release of WordPress 2.6
- 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.
Support
If you’ve got any questions about Fluency, you can leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out.
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 right 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
Never mind. Found it.
Where’s the DL link?
Beautiful work on the admin!
Fluency admin theme for WordPress is very nice! This is a very liked me. Thanks!
This is pretty awesome! Will install it right away!
Great work you’ve done! I appreciate it!
Very nice dude. There is some problem with sub menus display in firefox.
Hi!
Plugin does not like german backend? Breaks in my backend…
Greetz
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.
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!
so cool :)
Fantastic work! This should be the default admin theme ;-)
Thank you very much for sharing. Great work.
Just found one little problem: If there are too many entrys in the second menu level, it overlays with the header of the subpage.
Thanks for that, much more pleasing for the eye than the original design.
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.
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.
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.
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.