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
Actually… further to my last comment…
I just now discovered that the automatic plugin update notifier does not pick up on some plugins being out of date when they are really old versions on there. I’ve now updated my Admin Drop Down menu and it works a treat with Fluency. Brilliant. I see it’s name has changed to include Ozh or something at the beginning… so that’ll be why the need to update was not detected.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Hi buddy. Thanks heaps for this great theme improvement. I was using Tiger Admin but it’s become uncompatible with WP for quite some time now… on my site it places the footer in an odd location etc.
Anyway… glad to have found your Tiger Inspired admin theme. The only issue I’ve come across is that it is not compatible with the Admin Drop Down Menu plugin. (http://frenchfragfactory.net/ozh/my-projects/wordpress-admin-menu-drop-down-css/)
And I really like not having to make two clicks into order to get to sub-menus on WP. What I would suggest is adding a drop down menu to your theme plugin… making Admin Drop Down Manu unnecessary completely.
With my regards,
Jonathan
I love this admin theme. But please give the background image of the “VISIT SITE” button a little bit more width because in the german version it’s called “BLOG ANSEHEN” and it needs a little more of space. Thanks!
wow, looks great :D
Simply put…
This is the superior WP admin plug-in!
I use it on all the WP sites I admin (15) and wouldn’t use anything else. It’s a great thing Dean that you continue to support and update this.
Thank you,
Pablo
Does it only work with a certain version of Firefox. I have 1.0.7 and it doesn’t work on that. And obviously doesn’t work on IE 7.
And it did seem so nice from the screenshots. Will wait for your update that works with IE 7. Thanks!
Hmm, I tried submitting this earlier and figured you had comment moderation or something turned on. Could have been my fault though.
Thanks for you work getting this going for WordPress 2.6. Unfortunately, there is still a bug with Ozh Admin Drop Down Menus. I’m not sure whose code is actually to blame, especially since either plugin works fine by itself. 1. Activate latest releases of both plugins. 2. Go to Design. 3. Click a theme picture to preview it. 4. The sidebar obscures the left part of the preview.
This is usually due to an admin page not following the same xhtml structure as the regular admin pages, its usually that they don’t have a certain div wrapped around the whole page. In most case I should be able to cater for it, I’ve got to update Fluency soon to fix the “press this” styles, so if I’m able to solve your problem I’ll include it in the next update too.
Great looking plugin. Only thing at the moment I have a problem with is that I use the plugInstaller plugin to install my plugins. fluency does not play nice with this plugin. The left 3rd (the area where your side menus are) become cutoff. If this is something that can be fixed, I will be all over this admin panel.
Thanks again
#footer {
height: 20px !important;
(must have important)
thank you for your plugin and updates, i got a simple hack for you:
you are using @import, probably because of incompatibility of IE. But it does not affect IE7, which is still buggy with fluency. But IE8 works fine. So the best is to delete that wp-admin.css and use just this wp-admin-fluency.php (starting from row 12)
/* Main function call */
function wp_admin_fluency_css() {
wp_admin_fluency_add_css(‘fluency.css’);
wp_admin_fluency_plugins();
}
add_action(‘admin_head’, ‘wp_admin_fluency_css’,1000);
/* Echo CSS file link */
function wp_admin_fluency_add_css($file, $version = ‘1.2′) {
$fluency_path = get_settings(‘siteurl’) . ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ . plugin_basename(dirname(__FILE__)) ;
echo ;
echo ”.”\n”;
echo ‘<! – ’;
}
I hope it will be saved ok. The point is, that there is special hack (valid of course) of IE conditional comments, so only things valid for IE starting from IE8 and up plus non-ie browser run the link.
Thanks a bunch for the 2.6 update!
Excellent PLugin… Much better than default admin screen
Great plugin,I really want to use it.
Thank you for your hard work!
Just DL Fluency Admin very nice work , I really like the layout and It was very easy to install, with WP2.6
Great plugin, really does wonders to my admin UI. Keep up the good work!
Small tip: if you find that you have to explain to people where the download link is, it means that it isn’t easily found. Instead of saying where the link is in the “Download and Install” section, why not simply put another link there?
Yep, that was the first thing I fixed.
and copy the styling for plugins count e.g.
#ozhmenu li a span#awaiting-mod span.comment-count, #ozhmenu li a span#update-plugins span.plugin-count
Don’t worry guys, Ozh Admin drop down support will be fixed (along with all other currently supported plugins) when the update is released.