From Away

In a massive fit of geekdom tonite (or rather early this morning) after the missus went to sleep, I decided that I wanted to put some of the ideas to use that Paul Scrivens wrote about the layout of the Wordpress control panel in his article “MT vs. WP vs. TxP: Entry Page Design”.

The first aspect that I started with was to take Scriv’s stylesheet and customize the colors to my liking, added new border colors, a new background texture, centered the layout, adjusted the widths to suit my control panel, etc. After that, I created a new header logo (which you can see in the images to the right) for the login page, as well as the masthead for the control panel. The last thing to do was to edit the main menu to move the last two menu items to the top of the layout. This was just a matter of removing them from the menu.php file in wp-admin and adding a new div to the admin-header.php file in the appropriate place (right below the body tag.

All in all, it might have taken me 15 to 20 minutes to complete, and although not a major change, it’s always nicer to use an interface that is customized to your liking rather than having to use the default options.