One of my favorite features of the WordPress 3.8 ‘About’ page is the live admin color scheme picker. WordPress 3.8 ships with eight different color schemes.
If you don’t find a favorite among the default color schemes, there are more options available using a plugin. A small group of designers have collaborated to bring WordPress users even more color schemes via Admin Color Schemes, which is receiving more interest now that 3.8 has been released. The plugin adds eight additional color schemes. If you install it, you’ll see the new colors available under your profile’s personal options in the admin.
You can click through the various color schemes to “try them on” instantly. These additional schemes were created by professional designers Kate Whitley, Dave Whitley, Mel Choyce, and Kelly Dwan. There’s something for everyone here, from primary colors to pastels to nature-inspired palettes.
Create Your Own Color Schemes
For the more adventurous, you can check out the code of this plugin to learn how to create your own color schemes. You might be surprised to know that the backbone of the color schemes is just a handful of variables included in its scss file, defining the base, highlight, notification and action colors. You’ll need to compile your new scss file into a corresponding CSS file in order to make it work. Admin Color Schemes offers a nice model for how to do this.
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Hi Sarah
What will they think of next?
Someone pointed out to me that WordPress admin is now mobile responsive and they had fallen in love with the new widget area!
I’ll point him in this direction for colour schemes.
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I wonder if the Plugin could be extended to take advantage of the CSS pre-processor now bundled with core, to allow for arbitrary, user-defined color schemes?
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@Chip Bennett – I’m fairly certain someone is working on something like this right now. ;)
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Love the new look. Reminds me a lot of nice sleek app designs.
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I’ve installed and activated this plugin, and would love to be impressed by it, but there’s no instruction as to *how* to change the colour scheme!
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@Ian – Hover over your name in the top right of the admin, then select “Edit my profile”.
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Oh yay, more choices. I was crushed to see that my beloved “seaweed” color scheme didn’t make the cut. Perhaps I’ll find one of these fitting.
Does this mean MP6, the plugin, is over? Do we just delete it now?
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@Vanessa Blaylock – It will be automatically deactivated when you upgrade and you can delete it.
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The new color schemes are nice, although the default one seems to be best balanced … or it is just that i most used to it by now.
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It surprised me when I tried this yesterday, but I found the red color scheme (“sunrise”) surprisingly pleasing. I’m giving it a try for the next couple of days. (Was on MP6 before anyway, so no major changes for me.)
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Ah, in Profile. Thanks, Sarah!
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Just as an FYI: Kelly is a developer. :)
Thanks for the write up!
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@Vanessa Blaylock – We’ll be introducing Seaweed back in soon via this plugin. Keep an eye out for future updates!
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Can’t wait to be able to easily create my own color schemes with something like this!
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If you want a different colour scheme than the default to be the ‘default’ for new users e.g. to match your front end scheme better. then it is fairly simple to set up the scheme on user creation, but takes a couple of lines of code. I documented that here on my blog.
http://llocally.com/blog/2013/12/15/wordpress-3-8-admin-colour-selection/
Hope some people find that useful.
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