Simplified EE Control Panel Theme
I’m currently working on a project that involves a lot of ExpressionEngine development, so I took a couple hours last night to tweak the default Control Panel theme. I’ve only tested it in Safari… so your milage may vary… but feel free to give it a try.
If I missed any bits and pieces, please let me know via the comments…
Comments
Nice work, Jesse. This theme seems to work almost identically in FF3.5 on Mac, FYI.
so awesome. loving the color scheme. I never have been a fan of the greenish color EllisLab uses for EE. Thanks for releasing this…
Why wouldn’t you just upgrade to 2.0?
I just made a few changes to the original files I’ve posted based on some feedback. Feel free to download again.
@chriskalani – 2.0 Isn’t quite ready for primetime, and there are quite a few people that will be using 1.6.x for months (years?) to come.
Very nice tweaks Jesse. I’ve never been motivated enough to make a custom theme for EE but I’m sure glad you chose to release this. I’ll give it a spin soon for sure.
Hi,
Can i use it for another project/outside of EE ?
Thanks,
Hi Jesse, I like the overall look of the new theme however if you have a lot of tabs in your CP (like I often do), then the fixed width design doesn’t work so well with tabs sticking out at the right edge.
Thanks Jesse. Your talent and work excels on so many levels! I hope someday you surprise us all with a EE2 theme that we don’t feel embarrassed to show our clients like the current EE2 themes. Yes, there all that bad!
Lovely theme Jesse. I believe .breadcrumbRight could do with a visited state though
Hi,
For some reason this theme does not work on my site. At CP Home > Admin > System Preferences > Control Panel Settings I see “Simple” theme installed and selected, but everything remains the same as in “Default” theme. On the other hand, selecting “Classic” theme immediately produces visual change.
Hi again,
I also tried to change CP theme at CP Home > My Account > Control Panel Theme, but it also did not work. “Classic” and “Default” themes work as expected, but “Simple” theme always reverts to “Default”.
Any idea what might cause this behavior?
Same by me
Hi,
a little glitch: when the menu voice (in the tab menu) are too long, in their active (and then bolded) state they take 2 lines vertically and the other tabs stop to touch the main white content and float in the black header (in case my english is too bad to be understood, try to create a tab named, for instance, Add-on Installer and make the tab active)
For those of you having trouble getting the theme to work, can you try changing the theme in “My Account > Customize Control Panel > Control Panel Theme” and let me know if that works?
Also… thanks for the bugs and glitch reports… I’ll do my best to iron them out.
Whoops… just realized you tried that method already. I just uploaded a new file, (that also fixes the 2 line nav wrapping glitch). Let me know if it works better for you.
Hi Jesse,
As I said inmy previous comment, going My Account > Customize Control Panel > Control Panel Theme one can select “Simple” theme, but this does not produce ani visible changes compared with “Default” theme.
If you would like to see the issue in action I can email you username/ password for my development server.
Hi again,
Just tried a new version, but it does not work as the previous one.
Hi again,
I found the way to force “Simple” theme to work – it was needed to copy “cp_themes” directory into “system” folder.
There is some glitches though. Menu background color is too bright and too similar to background color of the content.
Menuitems on mouse hover receive color which is too similar to the color they had before hover event.
I doubt also that fixed-width solution is a good one. In cases when tables have only default columns the body width of 960 px is enough; but Edit page table can have columns added by extensions, and in such case the width of the table exceeds the width of 960 px causing the page look ugly.
I would recoment to drop fixed-width approach and to return to full-screen approach.
I’ve made some more tweaks to this theme… mainly changing the width to 1080px wide. We’re using the LiveLook plug-in and needed a little bit more real estate to show the previews. It should also help those that like to use a lot of extra tabs.
Jesse, how are you getting past this issue http://cl.ly/KmY & http://cl.ly/JzB without installing Newism’s Morphine theme, which was created for the default theme only?
I just ran into this problem.
ryan,
Any extra CSS required by add-ons like Morphine should now be added into the simple folder just as you would normally add them to the default folder
Well I can’t explain it, but grabbing the latest version of Simple and re-uploading Morphine resolved the problem.
Happy Day.
Jesse, does it mean you’re not going to upgrading to EE2.0? What do you think of it? Thanks for your simple theme. I like it!
@Ryan… glad things worked out.
@Juliano I’m not quite sure if I’ll be upgrading my personal site or not. I made this theme while working on a client project which needed to use 1.6.8. I haven’t actually used 2.0 all that much, but I like what I’ve seen (especially being able to customize the publish page)
Jesse, I also played with it. I tried to install locally but it wasn’t successful. I also like it so far but I don’t think I’m ready to upgrade either. At least not my personal.
Thanks for sharing this Jesse, well done.
Great job. The admin panel doesn’t look so scary hard anymore.
This is brilliant, thanks Jesse. This ‘vanilla’ theme may well become my default for EE 1.X installs. Very clean and simple.
Out of interest, do you have any plans to produce a theme for EE 2.0? I know it’s still in beta at the moment but I’m sure they’re would be a lot of people eager to adopt a theme you produce. Not knocking Veele’s excellent work but it’s not quite got the professional and clean touch that yours does for EE 1.x. I know others are hoping that you may come up with an alternative theme: ;)
http://www.viget.com/inspire/thoughts-on-expressionengine-20-sneak-peek/
@Ian The beta should include a theme called “corporate” which was designed by me. I tried to keep it inline with the current branding of the ExpressionEngine website. Once 2.0 is out of beta (and after I upgrade) I might come out with another theme… but I’m really not sure at this point.
Jessie, the file upload option on the publish page also disappear. Any ideias? Thanks!
Whoops. Just reposted with the file upload not hidden.
Thanks Jesse! That worked!
Great looking theme, thank you for sharing. A couple bugs I noticed.
1 – When you use the “Create a New Category” from a post, the button to create the new category isn’t visible.
2 – The pop-up windows for uploading files and doing categories are now fixed width as well, is it possible to make only those liquid to minimize horizontal scrolling?
Anothere little bug i found.
The disappearing button thing, already noted in the comment above mine (the right top big button, as in create category, add custom field group, etc.) happens a lot of times in all the pages.
Thanks for finding those bugs Damien & Giuliano… I’ll try to fix them up in the next few days.
Third party modules – specifically the drag-and-drop re-ordering in Structure [1] seems to be broken. I’m not sure if this is a priority for you, but it’d be great to be able to use this on one of my clients’ sites!
Thanks!
[1] http://buildwithstructure.com/
I LOVE this.
THANK YOU!
This theme is awesome Jesse. Thanks for taking the time on it :)
One small request, can you reduce the font size of template names in the Templates section?
I can also report that Structure works perfectly with this theme including drag and drop reordering.
Any chance/plans for an EE2.0 CP theme?
The current default isn’t really cutting it for me, and I have a feeling I’m not the only one….
Thanks for this Jesse – just installed it and it works a treat! :)
Nice work and beautiful theme. Congrats!
Help Wanted
Jesse, thank you so much for posting this! It’s a nice change!
Josh tilton - April 07, 2010