Remember the my post about the Digg Style WordPress Dashboard several months ago? Well, it turns out that someone went through his plugins folder and downloaded every single file to looking for the Digg Style Admin plugin.

After that incident, a certain blog started distributing the Digg Style Admin plugin and what makes it worse is that the blog/blogger is actually taking credit for the plugin.

Teddy Hwang’s reaction:

Wow, it never ceases to amaze me what lengths people will go to get what they want. Like all default WordPress installations, my plugin folder didn’t have a blank index.html to hide the files. Some people have went through the trouble of downloading every single plugin I had to find out which one was the digg styled admin. I know that at least one blog is distributing it. This proves exactly why I didn’t want to release the theme in the first place. Even though I didn’t create the original design of digg, it sucks knowing that somebody went behind my back and took the incomplete plugin and started distributing it without my permission.

Here’s a video of the Digg Style Admin in action:


Digg Style WordPress Theme! – video powered by Metacafe

This is such an unfortunate event. After all the time and effort that Teddy put into this plugin it just ended up being stolen and distributed by someone else. This could’ve prevented if he limited access to his plugins folder, but who would have thought someone would do something like that? The plugin wasn’t even complete yet.

Don’t worry Teddy, me and my readers know that you were the original creator of this plugin and you deserve all the credit for the Digg Style Admin plugin. Keep up the good work! Due to the popular demand of this plugin, Teddy is working on completing it and releasing it to the public as soon as the folks from Digg approve it.

Advise to the public: Don’t download the Digg Style Admin plugin from any other source than Teddy Hwang’s site. This way, we can show that we don’t support internet theft.

Previously in the first two episodes of Pimp My Dashboard, I featured the WP Tiger Admin and Spotmilk admin themes. Just recently, I came across another admin theme for WordPress.

This new admin theme is called NiceAdmin, created by Douglas Karr of The Marketing Technology Blog.

I got tired of the drab User Interface in WordPress Admin and decided to write this plugin. NiceAdmin was built from the SpotMilk Theme, the Milk theme by Max Rudberg, and its overall main layout remains based on the default admin theme that comes with WP 2.1. I utilized the graphics and colors from the WordPress website. The CSS was fine-tuned by Sean of Geek With Laptop.

Screenshots:

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My Take:

Compared to the WP Tiger Admin and Spotmilk, the NiceAdmin theme doesn’t really change anything except the colors of WordPress dashboard which is adapted from the WordPress site. However, if you prefer the original look of the WordPress dashboard and just want to change it’s colors, then NiceAdmin is for you. For me it doesn’t really have any difference with the default WordPress UI. Overall, I give it a 3 out of 5.

Check out the NiceAdmin admin theme for WordPress.

If you liked the WP Tiger Administration admin theme that I featured in Pimp My WP Dashboard Part I, I’m sure you’re gonna love this one!

Sunghwa Park or known on the web as Ceprix, felt the need to create a WordPress admin panel theme. So he drew inspiration from Mac OS X Tiger’s desktop search tool Spotlight and the Milk theme by Max Rudberg and created SpotMilk.

Since it’s first release, SpotMilk has been downloaded more than 6,500 times. Which could only mean one thing, it’s good.

Screenshots:

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SpotMilk features:

• New WP logo designc
• New Login/Register page
• Spotlight-styled header image
• New main and sub menus
• Font and color changes in menus, titles and texts
• Removing box styles in the WP News
• New forms and fancy buttons
• CSS support for other popular plugins

SpotMilk is compatible with the following browsers:

• Firefox 2
• Safari 2
• Opera 9
• Internet Explorer 6 & 7
• Camino 1

SpotMilk was coded to fully support the following WP plugins:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• PodPress
• Popularity Contest
• WP-SlimStat
• WP-ShortStat
• Akismet
• aLinks
• PopStats
• Jerome’s Keywords
• K2
• Flickr Photo Gallery
• WordPress Database Backup
• Sociable
• Link Harvest

My Take:

I downloaded, installed and tried SpotMilk. What can I say? I LOVE IT! I love it so much, it made me switch from my previous admin theme. It only changes the design and colors but doesn’t mess up the original WordPress admin panel layout.

Btw, I’m using the BlackMilk edition of SpotMilk. If you want to activate BlackMilk, just open the spotmilk.php file and uncomment line 16, save it and upload.

What are you waiting for? Download SpotMilk Admin Theme for WordPress now!

There are two versions of SpotMilk so make sure that you download the right version. The latest version 2.0.3 is compatible with WP 2.1.x only! If you’re still using WP 2.0.x, you should download v1.7.5.

In this series, I’ll be featuring WordPress plugins or admin themes that improve the look and feel of the current WordPress admin panel.

Pimp as defined by Urban Dictionary means, “to make something new, fashionable, or stylish“.

If you ask me, the current WordPress admin panel looks plain and boring. I’m not sure if you agree with me but if you do, would you like to “pimp” your WP admin panel? While we wait for the release of Digg style WP Dashboard, here’s a WP admin theme that’ll make your WordPress admin panel look fresh and clean.

This admin theme is called WP Tiger Administration. The man behind this project is Steve Smith of OrderedList.com, an independent web designer, developer, and consultant.

The look and feel of the original version of WP Tiger Administration was inspired by the Mac OS X Tiger’s interface, hence the name Tiger Style Administration. Now in it’s 3.0 version, it has been completely redesigned, a lot faster and has better WordPress 2.0 support and compatibility.

Tiger Administration is compatible with Safari and Firefox. This theme is powered by CSS2 and that means it doesn’t work with Internet Explorer because IE doesn’t comply with CSS2 specifications. If you’re using Internet Explorer, the plugin will default back to the original WordPress administration design.

Screenshots:

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My Take:

I’ve been using this theme since the first version of Tiger Administration was released in June 2005. I installed the latest version, 3.0 right after I upgraded to WordPress 2.1. I like the way the new Tiger Administration is designed, it looks so sleek and compact. I like how the main navigation is placed on the left side. I also like the color scheme.

What I don’t like about it is that it makes some areas and parts of the panel out of place or messed up. One example is when you have the Rich Text Editor enabled. If you switch to Code mode, it moves the content/message box over to the right making it overlap with the options on the right side. These are not major flaws but they can be annoying at times.

Check it out yourselves and give the WP Tiger Administration plugin a try.

Stay tuned for Pimp My Dashboard Part II as I’ll be featuring the admin theme that I’m currently using. :D

Teddy Hwang, a site designer was having a bad week. His creative juices wasn’t flowing and it was affecting his work. So in his frustration with work, he spent his time on something else. He ended up modding the WordPress Admin Dashboard to look like Digg.

Screenshots:

Before you ask where you can get it or download it from, I’m sorry to say that this is not available to the public. The author, Teddy Hwang created this for personal use and at the moment, won’t release this to the public because he believes that it is a blatant violation of Digg’s trademarks and also as way of respecting the designers of Digg.

But things can still change. If someone from Digg, like say Kevin Rose gives a go signal and allows it, most likely Teddy will make it available to the public as a WordPress plugin, right Teddy? Hehe

For more info and larger screenshots, visit Teddy Hwang’s blog.

Btw, if you’re interested in having something like this for your WordPress Dashboard, there are a couple plugins that works exactly like this. I’ll be talking about them in future posts. So stay tuned!