Drupal Admin Theme
Designed as an admin theme yet can be used as a regular theme
37 comments
Share our glory:
I started working on an admin theme for Drupal over two months ago in my spare time and just got around to packaging it up offering it up for download. I've used it on a a few client's sites and they seem to like it so hopefully someone else can get some use out of it.
As you may or may not know Drupal has the ability to switch from your site's theme to an admin theme when the user is logged in as an admin and in the "/admin" URL. Typically I used the Garland theme for this purpose as it looks different than any theme I've made so it's easy to tell if you the user are in the "admin" area as opposed to viewing a site. Not to mention the Garland theme looks and and works great too.
The only annoyance I've had with switching over to an admin theme is that when you go to edit a page it takes you to the "edit" page but still uses your site's theme. This can get confusing as you are in the admin menu but yet your theme isn't using the admin theme you selected. To fix this I created a module for my theme which uses my Drupal admin theme for the "add", "edit" and "delete" pages.
Screenshot of my Drupal admin theme:
So if you download my Drupal admin theme be sure to install the module for it as well. Also be sure to activate it through the "modules" page. It probably won't work for everyone but it seems to do the job for me and my clients so far. Feel free to rip it apart and make it your own.
Ready to give it a try? Go ahead and download my Drupal admin theme.
You can also grab the module here.
If you like the theme or have any ideas on how to improve it please let me know as it's still a work in progress. I'm pretty sure I'll update it to Drupal 6 when that becomes officially released. It can also be used as a regular theme for your site - not just an admin theme.
Make people smarter:
Full Name
Jeremy Caldwell
Website
http://eternalistic.net
Email Address
jeremy@eternalistic.net
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Be sure to check out the latest from Smashing Magzine. They have a great article on CSS Specifity. Might be a review for some but still a good read.
Did you know that you can apply more than one element to a DIV or Class? This allows you to specify different styles to one class without the need for another DIV or Class on that element. Saves on code bloat as well.
Have a look at this article for a better explanation and example.
D6 version...
Drupal 6 includes the ability to use the admin theme for node add/edit pages as well as the /admin section. I think the theme will definitely be a nice addition to the ecosystem. Will you be adding it to the drupal.org CVS repository?
Drupal 6 sounds better and better
That's a good idea adding this theme/module to the CVS repository. I'll look into how to go about doing that tomorrow (never done that before).
Cool! I'll check this
Cool! I'll check this out. Can you provide the link to the module?
You should connect with Thomas Moseler (eigentor) http://groups.drupal.org/user/3833 about this; http://groups.drupal.org/node/7439
We are meeting in about 9 hours if you want to join us; http://groups.drupal.org/node/7410
The download link above
The download link above includes both the module and the theme in one .zip file.
cool, thank you so much for
cool, thank you so much for providing download. You saved me so much time.
Freaky. I've actually been
Freaky. I've actually been thinking about these two things over the last couple of weeks. Even thought of doing the module myself and here someone goes and does it :) Guess I need to think harder about a proper way to handle deleted users and maybe someone will actually do it :)
Contribute?
Very nice and clean look! Will you be contributing it to Drupal.org?
Yup
I'll be looking into adding it to the CVS repository tomorrow.
Here too
I also started working on an admin theme. Or I should say, I collected ideas but I have yet to start implementing them. The funny thing is I have a very different approach, and will have a totally different look :)
There are good ideas here, like the ( view site » ) button and the account info on the top right!
The more the better
Glad to here I wasn't the only one thinking about creating an admin theme. Feel free to steal/copy/rip anything you want from my theme - that's what it's for.
Different theme for Admin
As a Graphic/Web Designer making Drupal themes for clients it can save clients alot of money to use a seperate theme for the admin area than their custom theme. I used Garland for a long time as well. I have created custom admin areas built into site themes. I've also found that a flexible width would work best for admin themes. Another reason why Garland always worked well.
Another admin theme for Drupal 5
Well, this reminded me that I started a push to port the civicspace theme's admin part to post 4.7 Drupal development version way back in 2006 August. It worked (sort of). Now I was very much interested whether it works with Drupal 5 still. Well, it did not work. So I did the few updates required, and there you are. It is still in my sandbox, and it is definitely not release worthy, has quite a lot of hacks.
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/sandbox/goba/admin/
Screenshots: screenshot-full.png and screenshot-full2.png
That's also up for grabs, but I might get to cleaning it up as I might need it for l10n_server as a nice minimal theme for translation editors. Anyway, let me know if someone would like to clean it up.
http://drupal.org/user/4166/contact
Nice clean theme
I like the nice clean appearance of that theme. The layout seems to work quite well too. Thanks for posting it here, maybe I'll take some ideas from it and continue to develop upon mine.
Drupal 6 port is easy
Like Jeff said, Drupal 6 has built in support for what your module does; and I found converting your theme to work in my drupal 6 sandbox was as easy as adding a .info file for the theme and changing a couple of the phptemplate variables you call that aren't available in d6.
Great theme!
It doesn't work very well with the admin_menu module because of your wordpress/iGoogle style header, but with a couple easy tweaks to admin_menu.module I put the admin menu drop downs into the primary links area.
Here's a screenshot: http://www.brianmcmurray.com/files/drupal_admin.png
Thanks for the port!
That's pretty cool that you ported it over to Drupal 6 already. I've been meaning to give it a try so glad to know you got it working. Thanks for posting the screenshot too, I'd like to see what others do with the theme so I really appreciate it.
I've got a few more smaller CSS changes I forgot to include with my initial release of the theme so I'll post them shortly. Also need to get the theme on the Drupal CSV sometime soon.
Drupal Admin Theme
Great Theme!
Status?
Has this made its way into the repository yet?
I have some things that I'd like to add, and so I'd like to check it out and provide some patches.
It would also give us a place to discuss this in greater detail.
Not there yet
Hi Trevor, thanks for keeping me on my toes and reminding me there are people out there interested in adding patches to the theme. I haven't had time this past week with getting our house ready to sell and work all day to even sit down and read how to add the theme to the Drupal CVS.
This week should be a little more slow so I will look into adding it once I get off work today. I'll post here with a link to the theme once it's all set and ready to go. Thanks again.
Got CVS info!
I applied for and was granted access to the Drupal CVS so I should be able to get the theme on there real soon. Will update this post again once I've got everything set.
Theme has been added to Drupal CVS!
Alright I finally found some time and figured out how to add my theme to the Drupal CVS. I created a project page for it and everything seems to be in place.
I gave the project the name "Nerdalistic". And here is a link to the project: http://drupal.org/project/nerdalistic
You can download the latest release (slightly newer than the one here.) Please feel free to download it and submit patches/ideas/graphics and whatever else you may come up with. I look forward to adding onto this theme and getting it working much better than what it is now with everyone's help.
Admin Theme
Hi Jeremy
Well done on your Drupal admin theme and module.
I've been working on my own theme and have the same issue with the edit pages using the site's theme rather than the admin one. When you have time, could you point me in the right direction to 'break apart', as you put it, your module? (ie where to start!) Is it just hooking to the correct style sheet? Regards :)
If you download my admin
If you download my admin theme .zip file here on the site you will see a module directory. Within there is all the code neccessary to turn your theme into a module. And the module code just says to use your theme when adding/editing/creating pages etc.
You can take mine and just replace everything that says "drupaladmin" with the name of your theme. For example if you theme is called "couper" and is in the /sites/default/themes/couper folder, change every reference from "drupaladmin" to "couper".
Inside the module folder in the .zip file you will see a folder named "drupaladmin". Rename that to "couper" and then rename the files within it to "couper.info" and "couper.module". Open up each file with notepad or whatever text editor you use and rename all references from "drupaladmin" to "couper" and you should be all set.
So now you just have to log onto your site and enable your newly created module "couper" and you should be all set as for editing/creating/adding pages. If this doesn't make much sense please respond here and I'll do my best to help clarify things, good luck!
Your admin
Downloaded and installed - works great - for anyone else, just follow the clear instructions - many thanks for your help :)
Similar theme for Drupal 6
You may want to check out this blog - http://sotak.co.uk/drupal-admin-theme-vol-1. It is about similar theme for Drupal 6 with some additional functionality.
Admin theme
Thanks a bunch man! I really appreciate it. I've been pulling my hair out for awhile now and finally got your download! WOOT!
module not in the tar.gz file
Hey there - I love this theme but when I download the tar.gz file there is no module within it. Perhaps this has been removed recently?
In any case, can you please provide a link to the module or to the tar.gz that contains the module as well as the theme? Thank you!
Module
I just updated my post with a link to the module for download. I have the theme hosted on Drupal.org but didn't include the module that goes with it for the Add/Edit/Create pages.
You can grab the module here.
Thanks!
Excellent! Works like a charm. Thank you for your time and effort and for GPLing this.
Bug report
Hey - your module is great and I'm loving it.
I did notice something that I thought I'd bring to your attention, though. When you edit the menu, module, and other areas, after you click "submit" you come back to the default theme, not the admin theme. This happens even with the module installed and even though these pages normally work just fine with the admin theme.
If I figure out a solution, I'll be sure to send it to you.
I've seen that before..
Not sure what causes it but I've seen this issue before. I know that when I'm editing blocks sometimes it loads my admin theme and sometimes it loads the sites theme. And yeah if you find a way to make it consistent please let me know so I can update the module.
Re: I've seen that before..
Actually, with "blocks," that makes good sense and that's actually a different issue than the one I'm having.
With blocks, I always end up in the default theme, not the admin theme. That's good, in my opinion, because when you're working with blocks you're (usually) defining where the blocks should go on the default site theme, so it's helpful to be in that theme at that moment. For me, this issue is not intermittent; I'm consistently in the default theme for this.
The issue I'm describing happens under "menus," "modules," and perhaps other places. I always enter these and am in the admin theme. But after I "submit" changes, I'm kicked into the default theme.
I think that what you're talking about is different from what I'm talking about but I'm concerned about the "sometimes" you mentioned because for me, these are consistent behaviours.
In any case, I'm going to look into the second issue described here and of course I'll share my findings if I have any.
Blocks
It sometimes is handy to be in that theme sometimes. Yet it would be awesome if this was a setting so that in some cases you can overrule the theme switching. Some themes just don't work for an admin because they might be really small fixed width divs or whatever... hopefully you know what I'm trying to say :)
... yes,yes I'm new at all of this
OK, I've installed the theme and installed and activated the module. I'm testing Drupal out on a local machine. Voila, the admin theme appears in all of it's glory, but alas the top menu items (admin, create content, blocks, etc) have an incorrect path. The links in the body of the page under "Administer" all seem to work fine. If someone could clue me in on where I'm going astray that would be great.
Thanks!
Tom
Hard coded links
That's because the links on the theme are currently hard-coded (should be dynamic but haven't had the time to fix lately). You may not have clean url's on or your Drupal installation is not in the root folder of your web server. Either one of these will change the URL of your site/links in the theme.
In order to fix this you need to open the theme's "page.tpl.php" and change the location where the links are pointing to. Just enter the appropriate location on your server to those pages and save it, that should do it for now.
All fixed!
I finally got the dynamic menus working correctly (no more hard coding!). Thanks ica for the code. I committed the changes so the new page.tpl.php should be available for download shortly.
Just wondering...
why you are not using the theme yourself on this site. Is not finished yet or are there any other problems currently that makes it not yet production ready?
Thanks!
Joep
BTW Great effort!!!
I use it sometimes
Here on Nerdliness we tend to use the Simplemenu module quite a bit and I guess I've just grown accustomed to it as well. I still use my admin theme on a couple of client sites so I guess it all comes down to preference.
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