WordPress Administration Design: Tiger

After working with WordPress for several months now, I felt the Administration area needed a little ‘freshening up.’ I wanted the utility to feel more like an application, and less like a traditional website. So I pulled some inspiration from my newly installed OS X Tiger, and created a mockup with Fireworks.

Update: Version 1.3 Available

Update: For future news about this plugin, download info, and more, visit the WP Admin Tiger page.

I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to touch the XHTML of the Administration, just the CSS file, and adding a few images. Almost Zen Gardenesque. It wasn’t until I started digging through the XHTML that I realized what a challenge this would be.

It’s clear to me now that the WordPress developers have placed their primary focus on the front-end of their product, as well they should. With limited (read: volunteered) resources, features should be added and code tuned where it will be of most use. This is obvious with innovations like the Template System. However, this front-end focus would appear to have left the XHTML of the back-end a little anemic. (Please don’t misread this paragraph, it is in no way degrading the WP team, they produce an excellent product.)

Never one to back down from a challenge, my ensuing CSS development relied heavily on the additional hooks and selectors provided by CSS2. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, the only ‘widespread’ browsers to understand CSS2 are Firefox and Safari, and since the JavaScript quicktag buttons used in the WP Admin aren’t yet compatible with Safari, that leaves Firefox as the only fully function option. It will still work in other browsers, it just may not look very good. With the new plugin features, in browsers other than Firefox and Safari, the WP Admin area will default back to the original design.

Here are a few screenshots:

Dashboard

Write a Post

Manage Posts

To install the new Administration design, just download the plugin and unzip unzip it into your wp-content/plugins folder. Then just load up your Admin area Firefox, activate the plugin, and enjoy.

The more I play with CSS2, the more I realize how important it is that browser developers work towards its standards. It opens up brand new styling methods, and I can see its ability to cut down the size of your XHTML files even further. It’s the next, inevitable, step.







To Download Tiger WP Administration, visit the WP Admin Tiger page

234 Comments

  • Frank Manno

    Wow, Steve!

    In a word: Beautiful…

  • Michael Simmons

    Very cool, Steve.

    You’ll be happy to know that I have already integrated it into a fairly large project I am working on.

  • Jeff Smith

    Looks excellent Steve. I’ve never been a fan of the wp-admin area, and since upgrading to 1.5.1 I haven’t had the chance to customize it to my liking. This definitely did the trick!

  • Zachary Jones

    My God. Great work. Thank you!

  • Sara White

    Gorgeous. Every time I used wordpress, I always thought about how ugly it was. This new look is a huge, huge improvement.

  • John Nunemaker

    I know I have already told you this but really nice work. Not only does the admin area look nicer, but it functions better. One of the things I am fondest of is the excerpt area size increase. The default excerpt area is so stinking small you can only read one or two lines at a time. Also, nice attention to detail in all areas of the new admin style.

  • John Nunemaker

    Hey Steve, I just noticed that floats all the way to the left in the navigation. I thought it was just with a plugin, but it also occurs on the categories pages and such. Thought you might want to know.

  • Leony

    WOW, very nice!
    Thanks.

  • Ajay D'Souza

    Beautiful, but unfortunately it doesn’t work in stupid IE. :(

    Can you pull up something that will make it work in IE as well?

  • bish

    The screenshots filled me w/ lust and I knew I had to play with this!

    Great job!

  • John

    Excellent work; I’m a huuuuuge fan of Wordpress but have always thought that the Admin area could do with sprucing up – this new design is so much nicer to navigate around.

  • Jeff Minard

    Very, very nice work. A few section the “super blue” of tiger is a bit over used ( the plugins page with many active plugins is quite shockingly blue, as an example ).

    Additionally, you may want to combine all the background images for the navigation into a single image that is repositioned via css (background-position, i believe) that when people click one, it loads the whole set and there’s no more waiting.

    Finally, the CSS styles totally wreak havok when using the “Write it” bookmarklet.

    All of this minor in comparision to the GREAT FREAKING JOB YOU DID.

  • nikkiana

    It looks very lovely… but it does malfunction when in IE… Not that I would normally use it in IE, but in case I were stuck in a bind with a computer that online had IE and I wasn’t allowed to download Firefox…

    Another problem… I allowed a friend of mine to view the new style in my blog under a guest login, and it tossed back something that looked rather odd (see screenshot). I don’t know what’s causing it… and it’s not happening for me… he’s using Firefox as well.

  • Jeff Minard

    Oh, and one last thing. Having the “comments” box scroll was kinda nice. As it is, my bazillion categories push the post page down a lot

    Oh hey, my comment preview plugin – :D Nifty!

  • zaque

    First off, let me say that this thing rocks. Just a note, in the CSS file, in the #wp-head block, I had to change the position variable to “absolute” so that the “view site” button wouldn’t scroll down.

  • Sean

    Very nice. I had been thinking about doing something like this myself. Thanks.

  • Mark

    Steve, mint style thanks a lot.

    One problem/bug: the PressIT Popup is knackered. The page that loads has a body id of “wpbookmarklet” so I think specifying just slightly different dimensions for that would be easy?

  • Younghusband

    Looks brilliant Steve. But still a little buggy. Will definitely be back for 1.0 tho!

  • Oliver

    That definitely looks great! Nice job!

  • Callum Mcleod

    Looks incredible. I’ll definitely consider this if i ever use WordPress for a personal project. For clients I’d have to wait until a more compatible style was available (i understand this requires considerable effort on the part of WordPress developers themselves, but i’m still hoping)

    Well Done!

  • Stu Schaff

    I love it! Thanks, Steve!

  • Colin D. devroe

    I’ve installed this for my sites using WordPress – and is now the official style for the WP installs of the 9rules Network.

    Excellent job on creating a solution for something that’s been begging to be done.

  • ian ashley

    Wow. Excellent work! I’ve always disliked the default admin interface… this is so much nicer.

  • Tinus

    Somebody had to do it! Great!

  • Jeff Wheeler

    Amazing! Thanks a ton for this, although I’m sure it wouldn’t be too tough to get Safari to look right. It is so close too!

    I don’t understand why quicktags are necessary for the theme?

  • Vitor M. Costa

    Nice work Steve… Thanks!

    There´s something going here to, as stated
    “The Shuttle will be a complete beautification of the Wordpress Administration Panel”. look forward to see it.

  • Jan

    Thanks for this plugin! I’m waiting for the plugin to work in IE as planned, though. Even though I use MF as my browser of choice, I may not always have the opportunity to use it on all computers. I’ll keep track of the bugs you eliminate in this one! Great work!

  • NIMA

    This is just absolutely b-e-a-utiful! Thanks very much for this!

  • Andrew Krespanis

    This is awesome — even the extra plugin pages look great…
    you smartass! ;p

  • Jd

    Great theme! I just installed it and looks absolutely marvelous!
    Thanks for designing that theme for WP!

  • Nico

    This is really great, thanks for developing a WordPress Admin theme that’s not as ugly as the original one but really beautiful!

  • Marvo

    Really great work and it’s so wonderfully Mac-like. It looks good in Safari. Love it. Thanks!

  • Angela

    It’s quack-tastic!! THANKS SO MUCH FOR SHARING!! :)

  • ^aNi

    Beautiful :)
    Already using it!

  • Jalansutera

    Whoa.. it is very cool. Thanks. I love it

  • Jason

    Excellent. FYI, “Hello Dolly” plugin doesn’t display properly (Safari 2.0).

  • MoiMM

    Beautiful ! Magnifique ! … Great work !!

    Thx !

  • Mathias Bynens

    What would kick even more ass is if you’d make this a plugin, like the SpotPress admin interface. That way, nothing should be backuped and stuff…

    But still, great work!

  • Shawn Grimes

    Fantastic job on this Steve. Thanks for taking the time to do this for the WordPress community. It looks really smooth and professional.

  • Drew Vogel

    I LOVE this! Is there going to be a version that works with IE, which is what we have to use at my office? If it becomes cross-browser compatible, I agree that it should become the default admin panel in future versions of WP!

  • Mark Lenders

    Guys this really ROCKS! Just added to my website. I’m also wondering what plugin are you using for the comment live preview. Is it http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/LiveCommentPreview ?

  • kartooner

    Beautiful work, Steve. Now looking at the backend won’t be such an eyesore! Likewise, I felt (like the rest of us Wordpress users) that the backend was severely lacking in the design department.

    Thanks again.

  • seriocomic

    Excellent stuff! I look forward to this becoming a plugin as well.

    Maybe for the next version you can remove the dreamweaver notes in the zip file however.

  • Brent O'Connor

    Me likey!!! :)

    Thanks for your hard work!

  • Steve Smith

    An update has been posted: Version 1.1. A few bug fixes listed above in the version history. No new images, so if you have already installed the design, you just need to overwrite the wp-admin.css file.

    As far as a version for IE, the only thing I can say is as soon as IE understands CSS2, it will work. Hopefully (cross your fingers) IE7 will play nice with CSS2, but at this point, it’s a no-go.

    Thanks for all the support, guys. I appreciate it.

  • dustin

    Wonderful. Quite simply remarkable.

  • Greg

    Amazing. At first I thought it was kind of plain and boring and didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. Then I realized I hadn’t correctly transferred all the files from the Images folder. Once I hit F5 after doing that, I suddenly saw the light.

    I don’t know if this is inspiring (i.e. makes me want to really learn CSS so I can do stuff like this) or depressing (I realize I will never be this good!)

    Thanks so much for making my WordPress experience Tiger-ific!

  • John Heltsley

    From the screenshots, this certainly looks impressive and wondrous. However, I’ve run into a small problem – namely, I can’t get it to work. :(

    Now, the instructions are certainly simple enough – unzip the wp-admin.css and dir into the wp-admin directory. Done. When I go to the login screen for my admin page, it’s skinned. After I login, back to default. This is all in Firefox as well, mind you. Also odd, if I try to go in through IE, although the formatting is borked, it skins the admin pages “correctly”.

    Thanks for the help, in advance – looking forward to using this. :)

  • antonio m

    Great job!
    only one trouble, it doesn’t render properly the ‘write’ page using Firefox. It foes a horizontal scrollbar. Everything else work fine.
    Thanks

  • Neil Merton

    Superb, simply superb!

    Now I can get to see what all the OS X fuss is all about ;¬)

  • mike

    This is lovely. Thank you.

    antonio m (#74) is right though: the the custom fields portion of the “Write” page forces a horizontal scrollbar, which then borks the left sidebar.

    Screenshot.

    Using Firefox on XP.

  • Richard

    You have made my day. The Admin look, organization, and feel is the one area of WordPress that makes (now I can say made) me uneasy and where tools like MT rule (used to rule).

    Installation is a snap, it works like a charm, my eyes are happy, I’m now fonder of WordPress than ever. Maybe Tiger admin will become the next Kurbrik of WordPress (in the best sense).

    Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  • David

    Hey, I love it, and I posted about it and have more screenshots at my site.

    Good stuff. Thanks alot.

  • smerickson

    This is great!! Thanks so much.

  • Moises Kirsch

    WOW!!! it really looks nice…

    Maybe you could try to convert it into a plugin just like SpotPress (http://homepage.mac.com/kohlmannj/wordpress/spotpress/).

    If you need help on this I might be able to give you a hand.

  • Flipthedolphin

    Woah… it’s amazing, brosky!
    Converting it into a plugin would be great! It would help the spreading of this stuff A LOT. Amazing work… really.

  • Fletcher

    Very good work. Looks really nice! Thumbs up!

    Thank you…

    Greetings from Germany!

  • Yannick L.

    One word: Beautiful

    Excellent job.

  • B. Adam

    Great work Steve. Really fantastic.

    For anyone who’s as hesitant to change WP’s core files as I am, I went ahead and made a Greasemonkey script that will trash the old styles and overwrite them with Steve’s great work.

    It’s here.

  • Daryl

    You did strictly with CSS? wow…
    Screen shots look awesome!

    Can’t wait to try this…

  • Joachim Guanzon

    nice, thanks!

  • indi

    very cool, however it doesn’t seem to work with Matt’s WYSIWYG plugin

  • Lisa McMillan

    I think I just switched to WordPress. LOL jk. Both TXP and WP have their benefits, but this sure slides the scale a little.

    I just set up a test area with this admin theme and am in love. Next project is going to run on this for sure.

    Just when I finally got used to Textpattern… drat. ;-)

  • Alex

    Dead sexy, great job!

  • Steven Vu

    Thanks the backend isn’t just functional now, but also looks pleasant. To bad hardly anyone will actually see it.

  • Steve Smith

    OK, so I made it a plugin. Thanks to all who submitted help. I was beginning to work on it myself, but you saved me a few minutes work. Thanks.

    I’m particularly proud that the new styles are imported using a method IE doesn’t understand, so IE will default back to the original style, no browser sniffing involved. So when you view the Admin in Firefox, the Tiger theme will show, but when you view in IE, the default theme will show.

    One disadvantage to the plugin nature, the filter that loads in the CSS file in the WP header file is not run on the Press It and Link It bookmarklets, nor the login page, so those will resemble the default look.

    Download it here. For those who have already installed the design, just load the plugin, activate it, and replace your backed up wp-admin.css file.

  • Jina Bolton

    I’ve converted all of my clients and all of my own sites over to this new admin design. They all are very happy, and so am I. Thank you!

  • João Craveiro

    Thanks and congratulations for your work - enforced by the surprise I got when I came back here and found out you made it a plugin (that’s just better than really good;))

    Just one little opinion of mine: the file editor and theme editor textarea’s should have a monospaced font, for their purpose is specifically editing code, rather than content. I know that’s not as Mac’ish as how it is now, but I think it’s more usable that way. ;)

    Bests,

    JC

  • Jason

    Smashing Job, Steve! I love it!

  • char

    Excellent work! It looks great, thanks for sharing this with us ;)

  • Kevin H

    Whoa, great job. I can’t believe what you’ve done with this. Very slick design work.

    In all fairness, WP has a pretty good default admin interface. But this one should replace it.

    Kevin

  • John Heltsley

    Wondrous job! My hat is off to you, good sir. Not only are the WP Admin pages nice to look at now, the plugin version fixed my problem of it not working before. :P

    Thanks again!

  • Tom

    Looks really nice, gonna take a peek right now.

  • Dominik Hahn

    Niiiiice :)

  • pickupjojo

    Wow, I want the same for my DotClear’s blog !
    http://www.astuces-win.com/blog/

    Nice work ! :-)

  • Jim Thompson

    Beautiful, just beautiful! Works for Mozilla too (naturally).

    I have a couple of problems: the currently selected tab (#adminmenu) doesn’t appear – like it’s white text on a white background. Also, the “view site” link in the header (float to the right) is invisible. It’s there, because I can click on it, but I can’t see it).

  • Jim Thompson

    Problem Solved

    The problem I was having with invisible buttons turns out to be a permission problem. The files in ol_admin_images all extract with mode 0600. All it took to fix things was a chmod go+r *.

  • Walter Hutchens

    A lovely interface! Much improved over the orignal. Afraid I’ve apparently encountered a problem, though. I use the IImage Browser, which adds an “insert image” button to the “Write” WP admin page, but alas this button disappears when I activate the Tiger Style Admin plugin.

  • Konstantinos

    Steve, I’m having the exact same problem as nikkiana (comment #18).

    Two screenshots of how the menu looks after I’ve hovered it:
    screenshot 01
    screenshot 02

    Could you help me fix this? (I’m using Firefox 1.04 – WinXP Pro SP2.)

    You’ve done a great job here, and I want to enjoy it to its fullest.

  • shorty114

    Doesn’t work for me…unzipped the ZIP file into my plugins folder, and activated the plugin via the admin interface, but the admin still stays the default WordPress admin.

    Maybe because you made it a plugin instead?

    (Just looking at the changelog…)

  • ceejayoz

    > Doesn’t work for me…unzipped the ZIP file into my plugins folder, and activated the plugin via the admin interface, but the admin still stays the default WordPress admin.

    > Maybe because you made it a plugin instead?

    Same here. :-(

  • Shahab

    Umm.. That looks pretty good .. But will it support IE ..? Or have you any plans to do so ..?

  • hafizmuhtar

    The plugin doesn’ work for me too…i put the wp-admin-tiger.php and the wp-admin-tiger_files folder in plugins folder,activated the plugin but nothing happened.

    But i did some digging and i found out that in the wp-admin-tiger.php files the path was /wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger/wp-admin-tiger_files/wp-admin.css .. i just changed it to /wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger_files/wp-admin.css and then it worked. Thank you for this beautiful design.

  • KMB

    Works great!!

    Looks great!!

    I don’t like the styling of the inputs & textareas, but I think, I can figure out, how to fix that…

  • Stephen Yeargin

    Yeah, I ran into the same issue. He just needs to repackage the zip file to correct this issue. I also noticed a lot of extra directories (starting with “__MACOSX”, so I figure a lot of it has to do with the translation from Mac to PC.

    Kudos!

  • Kimiko the Furball

    This plugin is grrreat. ^^

    Thank you very much.

  • Michael Heilemann

    Elegant implementation; great job!

  • Mark J

    I had to replace my stock wp-admin.css file with the one in the plugin to get things to work completely. In particular, active plugin highlighting was still the old green. I just didn’t see that mentioned anywhere in the install instructions.

    It’s fantastically beautiful, and usable too! I love being able to see all my categories.

  • junkie

    yeah , really god job . thnx.

  • Andy

    Love it and as a Mac user I’m now more at home :)
    Are you taking bugs/problems? I use ‘Jeromes Keywords’ plugin. On the write post panel this puts up a new input field ‘Keywords’ and a textual list of keywords you have already used. The input field displays just fine but the textual list is not showing. Not world shattering but the HTML is being generated so it is just the CSS missing it somewhere.
    But hey – thanks. There’s no going back after using this!

  • K

    shorty114 et al: As hafizmuhtar already almost noted, you have to upload the whole wp-admin-tiger -folder that comes from the package. Also: chmod +655 for the files, at least! I had some problems with that too for some odd reason. ;)

  • K

    Oh, except that I was wrong about the name of the folder inside the zip. Sorry. Anyway: /wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger/[everything here]

  • Faisal

    You rock!

    Genius, I tell you!

    Keep up the great work, my friend.

  • Leo

    You know what, you rock.

  • João Craveiro

    Well, here’s somemore of the same:
    http://homepage.mac.com/kohlmannj/wordpress/spotpress/

  • Ryak

    Hey, really good work. Thanks. :-)

    Unfortunately I have a problem with the newest version – 1.2. I’ve unzip the files to the wp-admin/plugins folder (so that wp-admin-tiger.php is in the plugin root folder), but I can’t activate it, ’cause the theme is not listen at the admin area/plugin. Can somebody help me? :-) Thanks, and sorry for my english.

  • Joao Craveiro

    @Ryak: it’s not that way - made the same mistake first time. You have to upload the wp-admin-tiger folder to plugins folder, so that wp-admin-tiger.php lies on wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger.
    Don’t forget to check CHMODs for files and folder, and should be fine. ;)

  • Scott

    You’ve done a beautiful thing here… Thank You!
    I had some trouble getting it to work at first. Had to chmod 644 the files in the “ol_admin_images” directory, as well as “wp-admin-tiger.php”. Here’s the setup that works for me:

  • Ash Haque

    Looks amazing! Great job

  • Del

    Great work, this improves the admin interface no-end, only problem I currently have is that, like Walter Hutchens above, I use the ‘Image Browser’ plugin and it’s link has disappeared, as has the one for ‘WP-Amazon’ which used to appear just under the post buttons.

    I checked the source and they both seem to be still be in the page, just not showing.

    Any ideas?

  • shorty114

    As mentioned by one of the responses, I took a look at the CSS URL in the plugin PHP file, and it seemed to be incorrect. I changed it, and it’s all beautiful now. I had to deactivate it momentarily because I’m on IE right now, but I’m going to turn it back on when I get home, where I have Firefox.

  • shorty114

    Ah, now I see what the wp-admin.css @import was for…I had changed the CSS URL to the tiger.css instead of wp-admin.css. Well, now I can leave it on.

    Thanks, great plugin.

  • Charles W. Stricklin

    Ummm, not to be a downer here, but I downloaded 1.2, uploaded the files into my plug-ins directory, activated the plug-in and nothing changed.

    I’m uploading the images as binary, everything else as ASCII; I’m using WordPress 1.5.1.2 with Firefox 1.0.4 and I’ve cleared my cache, session cookies and history. Still nothing.

    I also tried uploading your wp-admin.css into my wp-admin directory. Big mistake.

    Also, consider removing the Mac OS hidden files from the zip file.

    Help? I’m feeling left out. :/

  • xplatinum

    ^^

    You put the FOLDER in the plugins directory… not the content of the folder. Is that what you did ?

  • david

    I’ve uploaded all the files and activated the plugin, but nothing seems to be happening. I wish I knew why it wasn’t working, because an apple overhaul is just what my admin panel needs!

  • Charles W. Stricklin

    xplatinum,

    Yes. /me blushes

  • Ed Fladung

    Hey Steve, I too installed the plugin, activated it and nothing happened. in either firefox or safari. not sure what the deal is but i can’t wait to get my wp admin area whipped in to shape.

    do you have any ideas? i’m gonnna go tinker with the code, maybe it’s a directory path thing, not finding the new stylesheet?

    tight site design too, btw. love the live preview and all the rounded edge goodness, that css2 is slicker than Digable Planets.

  • david

    I was having the same problems, but thanks to hafizmuhtar’s commentabove it works. all you have to do is change the path for the file in wp-tiger-admin.php from /wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger/wp-admin-tiger_files/wp-admin.css to /wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger_files/wp-admin.css and it should work. Great FREAKIN work steve, I’m loving it!

  • Ed Fladung

    ahhh, Steve, I just read your flickr note that this plugin uses Firefox’s greasemonkey. is this true? if so, it doesn’t mention anything in the text above. just thought you should know. that’s probably why i wasn’t seeing anything in Firefox. i’ll have to go check out greasmonkey, i’ve been lagging on it, since i like safari so much.

    muchisima gracias.

  • Ed Fladung

    oh snap!

    I got it to work using David and hafizmuhtar’s comments above. and it works in safari! whoa, it’s gorgeous. Steve put up a paypal thing somewhere and let us tiger-fans drop you a micro-payment.

    We all appreciate your work.

  • Thinh

    Just amazing. Great work!

  • Jed

    Charles W. Stricklin, how are you unzipping the file? If you’re using the default Windows XP unzip functionality this could explain it. Try using something else. Try a proper unzipping tool..

  • jay

    Looks excellent!

  • Joao Craveiro

    I there. I know this is a lot specific, since it relates to a plugin rather than base Wordpress, but since it is such a widely used one, I think it would be plesant to fix this, if it is fixable from your tool’s side.
    I’m talking about Skippy’s Gravatar plugin. WP Admin Tiger’s CSS makes the cached gravatar “boxes” extra-thin, like 100×10 pixels or something, when they should be a lot “taller”.

  • Jonas

    Wow – thanx!

  • Johannes

    Great plugin! Makes the backend simply beautiful and much nicer to use!

    Johannes

  • Sofie

    Amazing piece of work! Congratulations!

  • mike

    WOW!
    very nice work indeed!

  • Stefan Winopal

    I need some help. I don’t know why, but my Administration always “falls back” to the WordPress default style. Even in Safari 2.0 and Deer Park Alpha 1.

    I use WordPress 1.5.1.2, is that is helpful. I uploaded everything to my plugins directory and then activated the plugin. Are there some capabilities the server has to have which I should know?

  • Scott

    Very nice! I love it!

  • Cam

    This is great, but I do have one (admitedly minor) complaint — I use the “Press It” favelet a lot, and it kind of messes with the posting screen in that (it’s quite easy to fix by editing the favelet to increase the window size, however).

  • William

    Hi

    It doesn’t seem to work for Internet explorer 6. I think it may have something to do with the png support. I would like to have a look at this style properly!

    I have done a few tweaks in the admin section but I don’t think it would affect the CSS.

    Thanks

  • david

    WOW — very nice — thanks!

  • Sphinx7

    Holy Cats! This plugin is awesome! I cannot believe the dramatic change. I can tell that it took quite a bit of time and effort. So let me say thanks for your time and effort.

    Cheers!

  • Andreas

    Great! I’ve had this in mind for some time, but I’m way to lazy to actually do a redesign just for my own pleasure… Many thanks!

  • n4crater

    I love it…

  • Björn Carlsson

    I Know it’s been mentioned about 197 times in the comments already, but here goes again: Great work, thanks for taking the time and the effort. WordPress just feels so much nicer now!

  • jheyer

    I know you don’t need any more praise (199 responses) for this theme but I gotta say “good work”. You’ve done an excellent job on this. Sure it can be improved, but immediately after installing this plugin it works and works well and that’s what is important. So, thanks for making my wordpress admin interface pretty. My eyes appreciate it. ;)

  • Henrik Pauli

    I’ve noticed a couple little problems so far:The submenu (black and blue on grey) links aren’t properly aligned, at least not vertically, in any browser (Firefox, Safari, Opera).The “newsfeed� on the Dashboard’s bottom, there are images before them and the odd ones appear all way, the even ones miss the last row of the image for some reason. Likely a line-height or an em/%�sized fonts problem. This is something that happens in Mozilla, by the way.The “( edit )� links on the Dashboard (#zeitgeist ul li small if I see it correctly) should be white-space: nowrap;’d because someone at WP thought it would be cool to have breaking spaces included there.

  • Kenneth

    Doesn’t seem to make much sense to design an interface to emulate OS X, so that users/admirers of OS X will feel more comfortable, but then not ensure that it works in OS Xs default browser.

  • telos

    nice work!
    however, worth noting the following:
    1) the perms are screwed on *nix systems
    2) the menu bar is way too wide for those of us with small resolutions.. would be nice if it were resizable

    cheers

  • jim

    This is gorgeous… thanks!

  • Nina

    Wow, this is awesome. Thanks!

  • François

    You did it Steve: that’s EXCELLENT work.

  • michael sarver

    Just installed your plug-in…

    …very nice!

  • TJ

    Wow… I am in love! Very nice job. Great incentive, well deserved make-over. Thanks sincerely!

    Also your site design is very unique and well laid out.

  • Bhooshan

    Awesome theme…simply loved it :)))

  • MacDork

    Great work! I just installed it this morning and it looks GREAT!

    Have a look at the Wordpress Dashboard Widget that just turned up this morning! http://www.paniris.com/wordpressdash/

  • Bronwen

    Wow! Thank you! It’s wonderful!

  • Julian

    Thanks a lot – just downloaded your plugin. I’ll use the next 5 minutes to install it – WP admin had to be styled ;-)

  • Carla

    I have to thank you for this wonderful theme, posted about it on my blog. I have a question though, I use the amazon plugin and what would normally be right below my text field is not gone, see? How could I get that to appear in the new theme? Thanks!

  • Colin J. Raven

    Installed the tiger plugin…oh my goodness, this is WILDLY cool. Lovely job indeed.

    One small gotcha perhaps, but when I’m in the admin iterface there seems to be no way to get back to “View Site”…or at least I see no link to it anyway. Guidance would be greatly appreciated on how to cure this.

    If I knew where/what_file to edit I’d cure it myself but thus far I spent no time whatsoever in the admin area…like most folks, spending time in the blog theme are itself.

    Anyway, thanks for a great GREAT plugin.

  • trovster

    That’s amazingly sweet. Stylish. Thanks for that!

  • Henrik Pauli

    #207/Kenneth: I tried in OS X.3 and Safari and it worked there just fine! (don’t have Tiger yet…)

    Steve, sorry about the bad formatting of the previous one, I had no idea that it’d strip <li> and <p>, as these showed right in the live previous window. Also no idea why you got pinged by my blog twice, it certainly wasn’t intentional!

  • Mike

    This is absolutely outstanding. I can’t say enough about how much more pleasant my WordPress experience is now. Thanks.

  • Colin J. Raven

    Quoting myself earlier:
    “One small gotcha perhaps, but when I’m in the admin iterface there seems to be no way to get back to “View Siteâ€?…or at least I see no link to it anyway. Guidance would be greatly appreciated on how to cure this.

    If I knew where/what_file to edit I’d cure it myself but thus far I spent no time whatsoever in the admin area…like most folks, spending time in the blog theme are itself."

    OK, I fixed it, or at least it’s a fix that accomplishes being able to transition to “Home” or “View Site” from within the admin interface, and here’s the fix in case anyone else runs into the same oddness I did (which IMO has nothing to do with this plugin:

    In line 15 of /path-to-wordpress/wp-admin/menu.php I added:
    $menu[50] = array(__('Home'), 7, '../index.php');
    which produces a “Home” link within admin, right above “Logout” and that’s good enough. Oddly (and here’s the reason for the original post) there is no hyperlink behind the blog name at the top of the admin interface…anyway, it’s now solved.

    PS don’t ask me what the significance of “7” is in the above line of code, it just is unique and it works. I jsut hacked at it until something produced the desired output.

    Damn this is a lovely plugin, and now I can enjoy it to the fullest. Thanks!!

  • PenguiN+

    Nice. Do you know when it will have IE support? My school is still on IE, and people complain to me about my ‘ugly website’, when I’m only admin-ing on it. Anyway, nice job!

    PS. Why is the ‘upload’ icon a download symbol?

  • Josh Powell

    Very nice! I love it.. finding this made my day, I told all my wordpress-using friends about this, and they loved it too :)

    I’m using it on my blog at thejosher.com.

    Josh

  • Al Iguana

    Looks superb, works like a dream. Thank you!

    One problem I have – I’m running the WP-Amazon plugin, and when I switched over to this theme I no longer get the Amazon link on my Write page (so I can’t access the Amazon Plugin)… any ideas of a fix?

  • XeroCool

    Nice stuff, exept can you please make it to a WP theme also? I think I would like my WP-admin and my theme to match.

    Thanks!

    -XeroCool
    xerocool119ataim.com

  • Zeerus

    this is absolutely amazing. I can’t wait to get my hosting set up so I can install WP and this design. It looks much easier to use than the default look.

  • Andy

    Hi!.
    Very Nice interface, Thank You, but Tiger do not correct work with Backup Restore Plugin by LaughingLizard (dinki@mac.com).
    Can you look this?

  • Rico

    I have also Problems with Version 1.3.
    I can’t activate the plugin:
    Warning: implode(): Bad arguments. in /…/blog/httpdocs/wp-admin/admin-functions.php on line 962.

  • goodsnake

    Ok, I am #256 which is probably too late, but I still wanted to tell you how much I love the plugin and that I think it really helps the look of WP. I have really loved reading your site for two years now! Thanks!

  • Daisyhead

    Wow. Can’t wait to implement this!! Thanks so much!

  • andufo

    BELLEZA

  • Allen

    Awesome, thanks a lot! :D

  • Lukepuuk

    Very very nice!!! Should be the default teme for WordPress.

  • Matthew

    In Safari 2.0 (OS X 10.4), a lot of the buttons do not show up properly. I’m talking about the buttons on the right of the “Manage” page. Is this just me?

  • Wil Rushmer

    Thank you! I hated looking at the nasty default style.

  • Brad

    Looks like in Firefox some of the textboxes end up too large. Post Password stretches the window, as do a few others.

  • Karl Bedingfield

    Hmmm I just can’t get this to load. Tried the suggestions above but whenever I refresh I still get the original layout.

    I even used as actual url: http://www.elyonline.co.uk/news/wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger/wp-admin-tiger_files/wp-admin.css which does download the file but not sure why it don’t work though.

    Any ideas?

    Thanks

  • goz

    hi.. i tried to install wp-admin-tiger and has followed the guidance but did not appear in my plugins page, what is the problem?

  • TheCurtis

    I installed the Tiger plugin and it works mostly.

    1. The top bar is all one color and there is no [View Site] button
    2. The sidebar links disappear when selected
    3. The WordPress logo in the bottom left is also non-existent

    Any idea why I might be experiencing these issues? Hmm, that’s pretty open ended… :)

    Thanks

  • Allen

    Would it be possible for you to add support for Hello Dolly? I kinda like that plugin. :)

    Again, great theme and thank you!

  • Olly

    Wow, that’s a massive improvement. Thanks very much for this :)

  • m0n5t3r

    Really good looking, but unfortunately it won’t work with the wysiwyg plugin…

  • April

    Thank you so much! It’s beautiful!

  • Martin Neumann

    What an awesome plugin! Congratulations. I love WordPress but always thought the default admin layout too boring and not pleasing to the eye.
    I’ve reviewed tons of plugins and this is by far the most outstanding I’ve come across.

  • Lee

    Really nice plugin

  • zz85
    I wanted the utility to feel more like an application

    Really coool! It did what it wanted.. until like an application I feel so attempt to move from one tab (in fact its pages) to another without saving!

  • Carla

    This is sweet!

  • Andrew

    Hey, this is a great plugin! It reminds me of why I used a Mac for so long … oh well.

    I just have one bug to share with you: there’s some kind of conflict with IImagebrowser … maybe not a bug, but the little button is visible in the dashboard when NOT using your plugin. I understand you can’t test for compatibility with EVERY plugin out there, but just thought it was worth a mention. :o)

  • BillSaysThis

    I’m having the same issue as TheCurtis. I’d truly appreciate a solution.

  • Michele

    I just wanted to leave a note to tell you how GORGEOUS Tiger is. Thanks for all of your hard work!

  • cheesetoe

    To TheCurtis and BillSaysThis: In my ol_admin_images folder I had to change all of the permissions from 600 to 644. When changed to 644 all of the missing images appeared.

  • Scott-O-Rama

    Great plug in!!! I love it… Thank you!

  • Dustin

    Wow, who are all these people that never come to your site normally! Hehe. All I can say is, good job on putting this together. I won’t be implementing it, but I can tell that you’ve put out a good product.

    Congrats.

    -Dustin

  • H2ORANGE

    Incredible.

  • Tracy

    Wow! thanks for making such a great plugin!! I love it!!

  • GlatzoPatzo

    Very cool plugin! I didn’t like the administration interface before. Now it’s very nice and fits in the firefox window.

    But i have a big problem with another plugin – the wysiwyg plugin. The textbox I have to type my entries is moved to far to the right because of the old school wp-textbox buttons which i do not need any more.

    Is there any solution? did anyone try to place a linebreak in the php code so that the textbos ist under the old buttons?

    greets,
    GlatzoPatzo

  • rich

    fantastic plugin – they should make it the default!

  • Edwin R.

    I’ve recently updated our news blog…Trackback

    You’ve done a fabulous job. Thank you and all of the colaborators of WP Tiger Admin.

  • Rob

    My goodness, this plugin is excellent!!! Thank you so much.

  • Martin

    Just installed your plugin … and it’s great.

    I always thought the default WP layout a bit bland and not really user friendly, but Admin Tiger totally transforms it.

    Well done.

  • Robin

    Very nice plugin. The new admin panel looks much better then the original… Good work

  • Kai Laborenz

    Hi Steve,

    I really like you Skin – looks much better than the original one. I just noticed two issues:
    1. on small screens the input field for post passwords at …/wp-admin/post.php is not properly aligned – it goes five charakters to the left into the main area. It looks like absolut positioning.
    2. The plugin “image Browser” I use doesnt work anymore, because the link to open it doesnt show up.

    Anyway this ist great work – thanks!

    Kai

  • Christina

    I love you! This admin theme is much easier on the eyes than that bland default grey theme. Thanks! :)

  • Abdul Mueid

    I would like to say thanks you very much for all the hard work that you put in to make this plugin. I am proud to be part of the opensource community where people like you partake and co-operate.

  • Charlie

    You so rock! Everyone is going to spend more time in my admin area than reading my blog. You’ve certainly given me something to strive for.

    Kudos for a brilliant idea & interface. Now I can write my posts with divine inspiration!

    PS. Love the Ajax!

  • Takuya Misawa

    Wow! This is looking great!! Thanks for the wonderful plugin. I really hope I.E will support CSS2 and more users can use and see this wonderful work. Cheers!!

  • Henjo Hoeksma

    After seeing all these compliments to your work I could wonder why taking the time to add mine… It’s very, very nice – thank you a lot!

    Too bad Safari doesn’t support the quicktags though in WordPress…

  • Paul Tutty

    Looking very good.

  • Andrew Christian

    Does anybody know of any other themes for the WP admin section? Not that I don’t love tiger, but I’d be interested in seeing what else is out there. It would be cool if there could be one plugin that would let you install new themes (like the themes for the actual blog) rather than each theme having to be a plugin of its own.

  • bob

    Great plugin! thanks a lot!

  • Bilal

    Very nice plugin! Thanks.

  • Kim Siever

    This is great, Steve. Thanks a bunch.

  • Big Dog

    This is absolutely great!
    I have one little problem I do not know how to solve. The buttons (edit, delete, deactivate, etc) appear to be broken on the right side. it looks like the right is a bit lower and overlapping the rest of the button.
    Can anyone suggest how to correct this?
    Thanks in advance for the help and thanks for the great plug in.

  • Vamsi

    Thsi is just a mind blowing plugin.
    Even though the visitors cannot see it, it is a great experience to the blog owner/moderator.

    Thanks to the great work.
    I am loving it.

  • Brett

    This is a great looking plugin but I get errors when I upload it and go to view the plugin management page. The error that I am getting are:

    Warning: file(/censored/censored/censored/wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger/wp-admin-tiger.php) [function.file]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /censored/censored/censored/wp-admin/admin-functions.php on line 962

    Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Bad arguments. in /censored/censored/censored/wp-admin/admin-functions.php on line 962

    When viewing the file in question line 692 contains the following: $plugin_data = implode(’’, file($plugin_file)); which is part of the function get_plugin_data($plugin_file). function. I get this errors quite often and it usually means that I cannot use the plugin. I am running verson 1.5.1.3 of WP. If you need any more information please let me know as I would like to know what I can do to fix this. :)

    Note: censored means that I edited the path as these are not relevant to the problem. ;)

  • Mike Steinbaugh

    The icons don’t appear for me on Windows XP using Firefox 1.0.6.

  • Rob

    Hey Brett

    I just had the same problem. Turned out to be permissions on the wp-admin-tiger.php file. Mess with those and it’ll all work fine.

    Hope this helps.

  • LJ

    Mmm…nice work on this…it’s really nice when people who know how to do stuff like this take their time and offer it to someone such as myself who could never hope to make something even halfway as nice :) Thanks!

  • Ganaesh

    This is an abolutely impressive plug-in. Of course, this geeky enthusiasm is coming from an absolute newbie who just set up his first Wordpress-powered blog yesterday. The admin interface now is more pleasing to the eyes, and thhe gigantic fonts in the default interface have now been replaced with an aesthetically pleasing design overall.

    Thank you for making my life easier.

  • Danny

    Wow. I love it. If only there was a Nucleus CMS version.

  • Brian

    Thanks for sharing this. It’s amazing? Have you thought of creating a WP theme? I would love to have something like this on my whole blog. It look awesome!

  • Brian

    (I’m sorry, I was so excited about this that my last comment had a lot of typos. This is what I meant to say:)

    Thanks for sharing this. It’s amazing! Have you thought of creating a WP theme? I would love to have something like this on my whole blog. It looks awesome!

  • Brett

    Hey Rob

    Do you know what permissions that you set exactly? I try to avoid just setting random permissions. ;)

  • theHawke

    I have 3 words.

    (1) Oh

    (2) My

    (3) GOD!

    FanTAStic job! I’ll be glad when it works in IE so my maxthon browser will pick it up.

  • Jesse

    Hey, fantastic plugin and excellent CSS work. Thank you!

    I have a solution to the problem of the Image Browser plugin dissapearing: go through the ReadMe that it came with & follow directions to enable Advanced controls (you can enable ‘Advanced controls’ under WP Options > Writing).

    You then have to reset the permissions on your upload folder to be read/write accessible to everyone; my setup would NOT work any other way (OSX 10.4.2, PHP, MySQL, Apache2). The button now shows up under the Post area below the content field.

    This is not a perfect solution, but it WILL put the Image Browser button back & enable it. Its likely that a CSS fix will reposition it & I will post as soon as I get time to figure it out.

    Brett: for you & others struggling with the permissions issue upon plugin install, it is the same as the above reference: highlight the admin-functions.php file (in the Finder via OSX hilight and hit Command+i for info, scroll down to the Ownership &Permissions and twirl down the access to the perissions fields) and set to Others/ Read & Write access. This was the only way it would work for me. Good luck.

  • mpw

    Amazing theme, I cant wait until I get it working however like a few others am getting an error

    posted below:
    Warning: file(/Library/WebServer/Documents/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger/wp-admin-tiger.php): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /Library/WebServer/Documents/blog/wp-admin/admin-functions.php on line 962

    Warning: implode(): Bad arguments. in /Library/WebServer/Documents/blog/wp-admin/admin-functions.php on line 962

    has anyone discovered a fix thus far:
    mwillett@gmail.com

  • 3247

    Very nice plugin!
    We wait continue..

  • HippoOnVodka

    Hi, just would like to mention that at the link category, if the category name more than 8-10 chars, the table cause the design to wreck. Anyway, nice work. Keep up the good work.

  • Richard Brown

    Hi Steve

    I really have to go along with the others on this one. The admin page looks very classy and you have done so much improvement.

    Well done and thanks.

    Rich

  • Christian Grunert

    This style is great. But it doesn’t work on my page. The images weren’t loaded. :-( And I changed the permissions of the upper folder and the .php-file.

  • Fred Oliveira

    #216, Christian: I had the same problem. Login to your system, get in the wp-admin-tiger directory and run “chmod 755 * -R”. The problem is permissions aren’t wrong only on one directory but all the files in the archive.

    Try that and see if it works for you.

  • Geofox

    Dude, this plugin is so cool ! Thank you very much for your great (insanely great :p) work!

  • Chris

    Thanks for a refreshing admin area. Now I have one more reason to spend all my free time on my site.

  • manu

    Thanks for your plugins.

  • Robert

    Very nice! Thanks for the plugin!

  • Roman Edirisinghe

    This is a remarkable and attractive replacement for the Admin interface. Well done!

  • Mike

    New admin page is so great!!! Thanks a million!!

  • Tyler

    Simply wonderful plugin! I Love it! Great job!!

  • Cory

    This plug-in kicks a$$! It’s things like this that make me truly appreciate open source applications and the people who extend them.

  • Ajay

    Hi I keep getting this 404 error in my error log.

    /wp-admin-tiger/wp-admin-tiger_files/url(\"tiger.css\")
    %20screen,projection

    I know tiger.css very well exists but why the error?

    Can I remove the screen, projection?

  • jsh

    Nice Plugin. I love it.

    Thanks!

  • Ozh

    Doh.
    creating: wp-content/
    creating: wp-content/plugins/
    creating: wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger/
    inflating: wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger/wp-admin-tiger.php
    creating: wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger/wp-admin-tiger_files/
    creating: wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger/wp-admin-tiger_files/ol_admin_images/

    The zip file is completely crappy.

  • Jeremy

    The images wont work. Any ideas?

  • Scott

    Nice work. I love it, but had to turn it off because it would not render the HTMLArea plug-in properly. Other than that, it’s great.

  • John M

    Hello,
    Nice Plugin,
    When will it work with IE properly.
    Thanks John M Net-ebooks.com

  • Damian

    I just stumbled across your theme (and site) recently and I love the Tiger admin theme. Great work, and nice site as well.

  • Edwin

    Thanks for the nice plug ;)

    I lik it much.

  • Jenny

    will it ever have a diff look? thats kinda… blah! but it is a nice plugin!

  • Bharath Kumar

    haven’t see tiger. but this damn cool.