Updated July 19th - Fluency 1.2 has been released, it is highly recommended that you upgrade at your convenience, especially if you’ve already upgrade to 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 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
(171 votes, ave: 4.58/5)
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Any additional info about your setup, browser, OS etc might be helpful. I’m using Fluency with 2.6.1 right now and its working fine. Keep in mind when viewed in IE6 and 7, Fluency won’t change anything.
This isn’t work at all on 2.6.1, ideas?
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.
problems with 2.6 - not working oz-drop-down - can be solved easily by deleting the adminmenu.css file from ozh inc folder with just minor problems
Hey Dean, love the plugin. Just a quick FYI: the new version of “Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu” doesn’t seem to play nice with your admin theme anymore. As a sign of how addicted I am to Fluency, I actually disable drop down menus, but wow is it obnoxious not to have them!
when i enable both simple tags and fluency admin ,the button on page /widgets can not be pressed,plz fix it in the next ver. thanks
now WordPress 2.6 is published,would you plz do l little upgrade for better use :)
Already working on it, however the current version (1.1) still works relatively well, the only page that I’ve found that doesn’t is the “Design” page due to the changes they’ve made to the HTML structure of the page.
I need to check the additional plugins that Fluency supports to make sure that they still play nice with 2.6 and Fluency but the should be a release soon.
Wordpress 2.6 was offically released today, could you please make Fluency compatible asap? Thanks and I love Fluency, great work.
IE and WPMU support would be great. does it degrade gracefully? i will try and get my company to donate when these conditions are met, as i think i could use it in an upcoming project.
It would be cool if you could highlight the message about a new version of a plugin in the plugins list a little bit more. It hard to see them ATM.
Since no one’s mentioned this here yet, your plugin needs an update for WP 2.6’s theme switcher. WP 2.6 is at Beta 3 and I believe actual release will be next week.
This dashboard is fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing!
wow. just wow. fluency plus fckeditor is a beautiful thing to use.
Thank you. — munsinger
Hi! I love this theme. I hope you can integrate other plugins, such as the Role Manager, for future versions… and ie7 since a lot of people are still using this browser. Congrats!
Glad to see the fixes Dean. I like it that your theme is fixed and the original wp is not. Job well done. Sorry for the bother via email.
Love your work! This is just what I’ve been looking for, beautifully clear and usable.
Like some others, the only suggestion I’d make is that it would be nice to choose from a handful of custom color schemes – I love the grey but I run two Wordpress installations and it would be nice to visually differentiate them. I know I can fiddle with the css but some in-built options would be cleaner.
All in all though, excellent work. Great integration with the Admin Drop Down plugin.
Thanks,
Martin
Nice Plugin !
!! But Please update for Lighter drop menu (the only one to include icons which is very helpful)… I really don’t know why didn’t you update for this one first…
You should also remove all these “Uppercase” it’s really aggresiv, I did it myself anyway ;)
Thanks again.
Managed to find a solution for the cutting off of the popup for tan tan flickr photo album lightbox. In the admin-tab.css file you have to add the following:
#media-upload {
position: relative;
width: 500px;
left: 25%; }
its not perfect but it solves the cutting off issue in firefox 2 and safari for mac. Untested in ie6/7 and windows.
It would be great if you could some how find a fix for using tan tan noodles flickr gallery instead of blaming him for it not showing up correctly in YOUR admin theme. If i went over and made a post on his blog about how it doesn’t work with your admin theme he’d say oh well. So where does it end? Someone needs to step up and fix it. How do you make your popup wider?
I have installed this plugin on my new Blog…thanks for the great work!!
thank you so much this is nice theme..
Djupi: my dashboard is blank too…with wp 2.51 upgraded from 2.5beta and Fluency Admin 1.0 upgraded to 1.1. Did you find a solution for your problem? Anyone?
Dean! Great Plugin!
However, when I have it activated, in the Widgets section: I am unable to select which sidebar in the Dropdown Menu at right, and none of the widgets are able to be edited. I have tried this on 2 different sites & servers, and it is the same each time.
Would be happy to try to help.
Greetings Peter
aaa
Just wanted to let you know I’ve been using Fluency almost since you released it and I love it. I don’t know what I’d do without it. Keep up the great work!
oh,Having found at last, thank the author, I have been hoping in DIY own backstage all the time.
Looks very nice, but didn’t looks good with Flexible Upload (http://blog.japonophile.com/flexible-upload/)
Tom:
This isn’t the fault of the admin-theme it’s the fault of the plugin writer.
There are some rules how admin pages should be designed and one is that you should wrap them inside a div with a id or class (don’t remember) if one doesn’t do this things might break… the problem here is that the normal admin css doesn’t require this since everything is left alligned anyway.
If you want to indent this area the wrapping div is needed. Anyway I think WordPress itselfe should add this. It doesn’t do - no matter why - and therefor plugin authors should do this… obviously this author didn’t respected this and therefor the plugins page breaks when you use a non-left-aligning layout. I had the same problem with my own plugin which was written for 2.5 but fixed it before releasing even the first beta of it…
Hey,
Love the plugin. In future, it would be great if you could make it compatible with the Flickr Photo Album plugin (http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/photo-album/). When you click the Flickr button on the page or post editor and the ‘lightbox’ kinda thing opens up the side menu covers the important parts about the photos etc.
I have installed this plugin, but I’ve got blank on my Dashboard. Other links work well. Overall, it’s nice new look.
(note: somebody can help me with this error/bug?)
Hey Dean,
This theme is pretty baller. Any chance of you perhaps making an actual WP theme based off of this? Maybe with a static header and footer??
Snazzy.
What licence is the plugin released under? I’m thinking of having a go at a similar plugin myself, and it’d be handy to use PHP as a basis.
Black is nice everytime. I like it! That’s pretty work, thank you. :)
Ooops, forgot tosay you also need to change line 1261 in wp-admin/wp-admin.css:
margin-left: 120px;
to
margin-left: 0;
Only tested in Firefox 2
I wanted to let you know that Fluency is an excellent upgrade to the WP 2.5 interface (which I think badly missed the boat in terms of usability.)
One thing Fluency doesn’t address is the problem with categories and other stuff still being below the Write panel. If you don’t mind hacking your core Wordpress files, there is a hack that moves these back over to the side bar, which you can get from Persistant Illusion.
Once this hack is applied and the Fluency theme is installed and activated, you’ll also need to make these changes:
In wp-admin/css/global.css, line 1192-1193, change:
margin-left: -21px;
margin-right: -8px;
to
margin:0;
In wp-admin/js/postbox.js, just comment out the second line that prepends an anchor element, by putting // in front.
That’s it — pretty much 2.3 functionality on the Write screen with Fluency beauty to boot. Just how it should have been! :-)
Thank you!
This is great!
This is, what I was looking for. Thank You!
Well, I think there’s only one thing I need to say:
Thank you, this is great!
It looks REALLY slick, which is breath of fresh air compared to WP2.5’s layout.
People: Let the Plugin Grows.
Clean and tidy work, Dean.
Keep the work!
Very nice theme, WordPress 2.5 will give us lots of new admin features :D
Thank you!
You did a great job on this plugin. Hopefully we see more in the nearest future. (:
Has anyone got this to work with Wordpress MU or WPMU? I would love to have this as the backend for me (the admin) and the bloggers. Can someone please point me in the right direction?
Thanks for a generally great plugin, but I am having issues with Safari and the left menu disappearing. There may also be an incompatability with ozh’s admin menus (which I also use).
I see that the overlapping in the settings is fixed now and that the sidebar links are made bigger. Great job. Why don’t you make this available in the WordPress plugins directory so that users can automatically upgrade, if ever?
Sorry my mistake. It is not working with my Firefox 2.0.0.13 with Xubuntu 7.10.
Tried to uninstall and install with no fortune
Thanks
thank you
Firefox is already (and always has been) supported. IE6/7 aren’t.
You did an outstanding job. Great plugin and effort.
Firefox support is a must though! Hope you will come up with an update soon, we are waiting!
Ciao julius
Could you tell us exactly where to put it? The beginning of the last line could be different, depending on how you’re displaying the .css. Thanks!
Thanks Dean,
I’ve just installed your plugin and it seems to work very good. If you’ve got spare time you could redesign the popups when importing a picture etc. in the writing screen. Those are still the old WP 2.5 colors.
“Less is more”
- Mies van der Rohe
Just gave this theme a shot. Very nice!
It’s certainly an improvement over the default.
By the way, I’m using it in Opera with no problems noticed yet. Opera has a few problems with WP in general, but Fluency seems fine.
Great Job :)
Good job, I like the style very much.
This is what the WP 2.5 Admin station should have looked like. Neat, clean, and in logical order of levels. Finding anuthing in the WP 2. theme is a nightmare.
Excellent — the only bug I’ve found so far is on the Design > Widgets page. The links to edit the widget properties aren’t working in FF 2.0.0.11. In fact, it looks like none of the links (aside from the navigation) links are working in this page. I’ll see if I can find a fix.
Looks nice! Very well-organized. I’ll give it a shot.
The psychedelic Ken-and-Barbie-Layout from the original WP2.5 was killing me. You saved my life! Did a great job!
Lorenz from http://www.sheng-fui.de