20 Incredibly Useful Themes and Plugins to Boost your Admin Area : ThemeFlash : The Quality Web Resources

Sometimes we just want to get our WordPress Admin area to look neat and professional just to add a bit more functionality and enhance the way we use it. In this case, WordPress Admin themes and plugins come to the rescue. Here are 20 WordPress Admin themes and plug-ins that expand the functionality of the admin area specially if design isn’t your primary skill set.

Of course WordPress 2.7 comes with a huge number of changes, a good chunk of them making some older plugins redundant. However some of us might need time to upgrade, until the vital plugins that we depend on gets upgraded too to be compatible with the new release.

If you need to create your own Admin WordPress theme you might find this post useful.

WordPress Administration Theme

1. Fluency

A very clean WordPress admin theme created by “Dean Robinson” with a smooth grey color scheme, menus rearranged, main menus down left, sub menus across the top, support for several popular plugins including Ozh’s Admin Drop Down menus and NextGEN Gallery. Fluency only works with CSS2 compliant browsers (Firefox and Safari - and IE8!) at the moment.

Download the Fluency Admin theme.

2. Leopard Admin

Inspired by Mac OSX Leopard, uses the power and flexibility of CSS to overlay the style on top of the original design.

Download the Leopard Admin theme.

3. iPhone / Mobile Admin

Mobile Admin adapts the WordPress admin UI to be more friendly to mobile devices, specifically phones. The iPhone / iPod Touch browser was the first target, but most other mobile browsers are supported at a basic level, and plugins can be used to customize for specific browsers where desired.

Download the iPhone / Mobile Admin theme.

4. JP Admin

The Stylish Blue theme keeps the same default admin structure. Having a nice dark blue color scheme.

Download the iPhone / Mobile Admin theme.

5. Planet X7

Planet X7 WordPress Admin Theme A dark blue, white and yellow (link) theme compatible with Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 and, Internet Explorer 6 (there will be a few little problems in ie6).

Download the Planet X7 WordPress Admin Theme.

6. WPhone

Looking to manage your WordPress install via your phone. It creates an option while logging in to replace the default admin interface with one designed for your phone.

Download the WPhone.

7. Easy Admin Color Schemes

The Easy Admin Color Schemes plugin allows users to easily customize the colors of the administration interface for WordPress. It works by adding a new page to the Settings area in the WordPress admin interface. Users can use the simple form to change the look of the admin interface without needing to know a great deal about WordPress.

Download the Easy Admin Color Schemes.

8. WordPress admin themer

With the WordPress admin themer plugin, you can change that, and not touch a single line of your WordPress code.

Download the WordPress admin themer.

9. Js Style Admin + Drop Menus

This Admin theme is based on the SpotMilk Admin. With a drop down menu, available in 2 colors: blue and green.

Download the Js Style Admin + Drop Menus.

WordPress Administration Plugin

10. Admin Management Xtended

Adds some icons to the posts/pages management panel with AJAX-driven CMS-known functions like toggling post/page visibility, changing publication date and title without having to open the edit screens or reload the page, plus changing page order with drag’n'drop, inline category management and inline tag management, plus much more.

Download the Admin Management Xtended.

11. Dashboard Editor

This plugin allows you to add whatever you want to the Wordpress dashboard through PHP and HTML even Sidebar Widgets. You can also wipe the entire dashboard or individually remove some of the more irritating sections like the Dev news, Planet Wordpress and the getting started section.

Download the Dashboard Editor.

12. Custom Write Panel

Custom Write Panel provides the functionality to create individual write panels similar to “Write Post” panel only with customized input fields. This plugin allows adding new input fields with a specific type. The following are the supported types.

Download the Custom Write Panel.

13. Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu

All admin links available in a neat CSS driven drop down menu. No need to click on “Manage” then “Pages” to edit pages, go to any admin page from any admin page.

Download the Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu.

14. Simple Tags

This is a perfect tool to manage perfeclty your WP 2.3 and 2.5 tags

Download the Simple Tags.

15. Lighter Menus

Lighter Menus creates Drop Down Menus instead of the regular Admin menus for WordPress, so that you can browse items with one click. Fast to load, adaptable to color schemes, Lighter Menus comes with silk icons, a option page, and a design that fits within the Wordpress interface taking the less room possible.

Download the Lighter Menus.

16. Category Selector Back to the Sidebar

Removes that advanced category selector below the write panel. Adds a primitive category selector to the sidebar.

Download the Category Selector Back to the Sidebar.

17. Pre-Publish Reminders

A simple reminder plugin that could be used from the administration panel within WordPress. Your reminders are input through the WordPress administration interface, and you can format them in a variety of ways. When displaying the reminders, each reminder has a checkbox that you can check to mark that you’ve completed that item.

Download the Pre-Publish Reminders.

18. WordPress Tweaks Plugin

This multi-purpose plugin specializes in simple toggle-on/off changes. It adds many useful settings pertaining to comments, posts, SEO, security, the administration back-end, and much more. Some tweaks can even replace plugins that you may already have installed.

Download the WordPress Tweaks Plugin.

19. WP-CMS

WP-CMS is a plugin for Wordpress that changes the functionality of the Wordpress admin backend to act more like a CMS. The blog functionality becomes optional and the focus is on writing pages to make Wordpress as user friendly for you and your clients as possible.

Download the WP-CMS.

20. Adminimize

Visually compresses the administratrive header so that more admin page content can be initially seen. Adminimize is a WordPress plugin that lets you hide ‘unnecessary’ items from the WordPress administration menu, submenu and even the ‘Dashboard’, with forwarding to the Manage-page. On top of that, you can also hide post meta controls on the Write page and other areas in the admin-area and Write-page, so as to simplify the editing interface.