CMS Made Pretty ?

[myshko]

UPDATE : This theme is now available from the forge.

Visit: http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/projects/geared-theme/ for theme files.

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Hi all,

I love CMSMS. So flexible and powerful and customisable. I've built a variety of sites all of which look and act completely differently. I can't thank all those who work so hard on it enough.

There's one thing that's always gotten to me though, I never liked how the admin panel worked. Mainly a personal, style thing. It just felt so flat and tightly packed in.

I know what you're going to say, "customise it!", so I did.

I've been working on a complete facelift for the admin panel. There's alot of personal reasons for this but also professional reasons as sometimes people shy away from using the CMS as it just doesn't feel nice to use. It's not the most original design, but I wanted something that looked good quickly.

Also, I've never been a fan of the branding / ID so I decided to give that a lick of paint as well. I've posted some images below of the work in progress. It's not quite finished but I'd welcome any criticism and ideas.

Brand Ident & Strapline


For the ID, I wanted something with a more open source feel (like ubuntu or something) with a more developer or mechanical slant. I went for 3 gears representing why I find CMSMS so useful, you can easily mashup php code, xhtml markup and css layouts.

Links to screenshots (Click thumbnail for large version):



Login Screen:
Pages Table:






Footer:
Page Tabs:






Help File:








Some things to note:

• - The Nav is now stretched out on the left (I don't like drop downs)
• - Admin Shortcuts are gone (never use em)
• - I Had to make some changes to class.admintheme.inc.php to make the structure work
• - Works in Firefox, IE6 / IE7, Safari and Opera no problem
• - Validates to XHTML strict
• - Added an RSS Parser to display news in the footer, so you can see if there's a new version.
• - Built using 1.2.4 Greenland

So there it is. Cheeky to just rebrand something I know but this is a community driven product and it's just some fun. I just wanted to freshen things up abit for the sites I run.

It's been a real challenge too as so much of the markup and code isn't as I'd like it. I'm really looking forward to a better admin template system in CMSMS 2.0!

Let me know what you think and tell me about your own attempts to style the admin panel.

D

[calguy1000]

I love it.... exceept for one question.... does the nav on the left side collapse ? so that it doesn't get out of hand if lots of modules are installed?

[cubix]

wow, i love it!

any chance this will be released as a admin theme?

[myshko]

Calguy: At the moment it doesn't although I have added js toggles before. I'm working on something that remembers what's closed, like a file explorer tree. That way you don't have to click to drill down each time (part of why I don't like drop downs) and you can keep things tidy. A good point though, I've never really used a large amount of mods at once, and alot of people would.

Cubix: If I can get all the bugs sorted and people would find it helpful then yeah, it'd be great to release it. I'm doing it afew hours at a time so I'll keep adding suggestions like the one from Calguy and making sure it works as a theme. Is there a place for admin themes people can download them?

D

[calguy1000]

Admin themes can be uploaded to themes.cmsmadesimple.org afaik

I'm anxiously awaiting this too.... I showed it to Ted last night and I would like to try it out in 1.3 and possibly consider shipping it as well as the normal admin theme.

[myshko]

Wow,

Okay, well I'll step it up a gear then and sort something out over the weekend and get something live for you to test and play about with.

Thanks for your support,

D

[leifnicholz]

nice work!! it would be great if this can be the default admin theme for 2.0..

[myshko]

Okay,

Got a collapsing menu working nicely.

All Items Collapsed:



One Item Expanded:
Two Items Expanded:

• - The menu uses the existing lists with an H3 added for the click events.
• - Displays it's current state
• - Degrades gracefully (no JS, all items display)
• - Works across FF1+ IE6+ Opr9 + SAFARI 2+ 
• - Has a minimal slide animation
• - Persists across pages (remembers what's open / closed) as long as cookies are enabled.

Still plenty of smoothing out to do, icons to style but things are progressing.

D

[ironblaze94]

Dude that looks awesome, definitly the best admin theme i have seen.

A hearty well done to yourself!! 

[Dr.CSS]

Excellent job, glad you added the collapsing menu...

Admin themes can be uploaded here...

http://themes.cmsmadesimple.org/upload- ... theme.html

My only wish has always been for the Users & Groups to have the ability to choose Admin, etc., right from the menu instead of having to get them from a drop down, just seemed like an extra step...

[Vin]

Very nice looking theme, it gives a fresh look to the admin (although the current admin theme is nice in its simplicity, it just feels too plain sometimes). The only thing I dislike is the colour - I prefer the darker blue like this one on the main site.

[myshko]

Vin & SchPeter:

No worries guys, I'm fussy with colours as well so the idea was to be able to change all the accent colours very quickly.

This means all colours are organsied in one section at the top of the CSS for a quick change.

And all the media is vector based, so I can release the assets and people can simply change the colours as they see fit in Photoshop or something free like inkscape.

I can also release different coloured versions along with the theme, so to change you can just swap / copy the assets.

If the base style, usability and structure is there and well laid out, colour shouldn't be an issue.

Hope that helps.

D

[moorezilla]

Wow! Looks great! Good job!

[leifnicholz]

hey there,, just wondering.. when will this theme be available?? ehe.. 

[BlueLaw]

Where did this get to!? Everyone's oozing with excitement about it, don't keep us in the dark!

x