@Andrew - I strongly disagree. There are many reasons for editing things on the front end, particularly if it is your users who are doing it. In theory you could style the backend to look like the front end, but that is going to create just as many (probably more) problems than doing it the other way.

Imagine if everytime you wrote a forum post, you could whizzed away to an entirely different looking admin panel just to write a single post. Most people fine that very weird and hence most (all?) forum softwares allow you to write posts directly from the front end.