Although I’ve already installed and tried WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate 2 in my sandbox last week, I’m still getting used to the way the content/options are displayed on this new version of WordPress. Fortunately for me, the upgrade went smoothly and I’m glad I didn’t encounter any issues or setbacks during the upgrade process. All of the plugins I previously used had were working and had no conflicts except for the Popularity Contest plugin by Alex King which required a minor fix.

Apparently, the WordPress dashboard is not the only one that got a facelift but the whole WordPress site itself which uses the same design/color scheme like WordPress 2.5.

The new design/layout is cool and looks much better and if you ask me, the timing couldn’t have been any better. Besides, a WorPress.org theme redesign or reboot was long overdue IMO.

Anyways, back to the topic at hand. Right now, I’m not using any admin theme which is quite unusual coz I’ve always used either the Tiger Style Admin or Spotmilk admin themes the past few years. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Tiger Style Admin doesn’t work in WordPress 2.5 because of the admin changes so I had to drop it. There is however a new alternative, called the Fluency Admin theme by Dean J Robinson but I’m not using it because when I tried it out, the option to edit the permalink (option found under the post title) wasn’t showing up. Thinking that it could be an issue on Firefox, I tried using it on Internet Explorer only to find out that like the Tiger Style Admin, the Fluency Admin theme doesn’t work on IE. So I ended up deactivating the plugin and reverting to the default WP dashboard which isn’t such a bad thing.

Widgets aren’t new to WordPress but in 2.5, you can add widgets to the dashboard. In my case, I’ve installed the WP-Stats plugin even though I already have the Firestats plugin. Just wanted to try it out and see if it gathers stats that are different from the ones that I get from Firestats. If the data it collects are the redundant, then I’ll just uninstall it.

I like the Password strength meter which helps you create a strong password in case you need to change your current password or if you need a new one. I also like the built-in tag manager that lets me add, rename or delete tags from within the dashboard. I used to have the a tag manager plugin installed so this means one less plugin for me.

There is one thing however about upgrading to WordPress 2.5 that got me disappointed. After the upgrade, I found out that the Akismet Auntie Spam maintenance script doesn’t work. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it’s a Greasemonkey script for the Firefox browser and made for WordPress or WordPress MU installations, built to work alongside Akismet for a fast and easy way of managing spam comments. I’ve been using it for quite a while now and I can say that it’s a real time saver. I’m thinking about writing a review about it once a working version for WordPress 2.5 is released.

UPDATE: The author just informed me that Akismet Auntie Spam 2.20 is now available for download. This version has WP 2.5 support and is backwards compatible to 2.3.

Have you upgraded your WordPress installation to 2.5? If not, why haven’t you upgraded yet? For those of you who have upgraded to WordPress 2.5, did you encounter any issues or problems during the upgrade process? Were there any plugins that you had to get rid of?

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:

Dashboard

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Plugins

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:

Dashboard

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Plugins

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.