3.8 admin panel design is very bad

i hate this update.

widgets are totally uneditable – 15x screen-height to scroll down to find what i need to edit. no chance to find what is activated and what not.

tags are formatted totally bad – 3 lines for one tag. looks cool with 50 tags…..

please remove the new “style”. css is pre-alpha.

@aksam Zarook, You need to warn them of the change first. You could give them a screenshot of what 3.8 looks like on your development sites(?). Say it won’t be that different from the original dashboard. A bit flashier. Generally things will still be in the same place as they originally were. You don’t have a problem with WordPress 3.8 do you? If not you should use your own passion and expertise to persuade the client, as obviously they don’t know best otherwise they wouldn’t have hired you.

@holospirit, “15x screen-height to scroll down” – Wow that does sound like loads, but then that is relative to your screen size. If you were using a laptop and you had a 1500px-tall screen then that is of course completely wrong, you shouldn’t have a 22500px-tall dashboard. Understandable.

WordPress should have left an option for users to decide whether to use the new look or update to the new design? Or at the very least they should have created a color scheme that resembled the old one as far as possible in the new palletes.

@andrew: no, i don’t speak of screensize depending on responsive-fuck (who the hell codes on a smartphone).
i speak about that every setting of active, inactive and saved widget is expanded to screen-width and all of then are put under each other.
see [ link deleted, that link opened too many spammy pop ups. Please use a reputable image provider instead if you want to share images ]

wp-admin-classic took the pain from 3.8-design away from me.

mch0lic,
Thanks for making this plugin. Will check it. https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-admin-classic/

Andrew Nevins,
I don’t like the new looks either. The colors are too bright and letters don’t show clearly against the color.

Plus I’ve made user manuals for my clients with screen shots of old design etc. Just imagine non-tech clients reading the user manual and logging into their website to see Windows 7 look when their manual shows screenshots of xp look? At the very least this change is going to cost me several hours, if not days of work of explaining to non-tech managers, users and staff of why their website needs this change, manuals need to be reprinted etc. This is time I or they don’t have and bad for business. I’m currently working on several projects and this is not going to be easy. Oh wordpress, please give us a option to keep old look.

It reminds me a tad of office 2013… that metro-ish flat matte look. not a fan just yet but it might be a grower.

The left menu could definitely do with separation but as pointed out you can do this with a mini plugin. Speaking of which heck no offense but WordPress is ‘open source’ its like your ‘unwritten’ responsibility to make plugins and improve it, get involved etc… not just moan your clients are gonna hate it.

The WP team don’t owe you anything, if you’v built your business on the software its kinda a ‘d’ move to complain about a change they make especially when its free and they give you a massive API to change any part of it you want… if you are to unwilling/don’t have the technical skills to make those changes then that’s on you not them.

Plus if you are zero involved in their developer community and did not comment on these coming changes when they were in development then its even worse… just screams of entitlement.
Write a plugin that makes it look how you think it should look with a donate button, if it gets 2 million downloads then you might make a few $ ??

/rant.

On a further note, the responsive elements they have added are fantastic compared to how it was before. Re-size the window and check it out! – no doubt some folks are gonna moan since their clients use an old 14″ monitor and all the text has disappeared ??

New dashboard is really poor. Getting tired of WP updates wreaking havoc with clients and users experiences.

What is really annoying is that these are merely cosmetic changes to the dashboard. There have been no real ux improvements been attempted here.

If the dashboard really had undergone a full re-think, then ok, but all they’ve done is re-styled it. So yes we can all have a go at creating our own “classic” style and popping it back in, but come on there are more exciting things we would like to be doing with WordPress.

I really agree with those opinions. Especially in the plugins panel, where is really difficult to make a visual difference between activated and active plugins.

The rest… Too much white over black. A very bad design decision.

I’v been using it this morning to do some content entry, not something i normally get involved with but must say it does feel much cleaner and pleasurable to use then when i’v been roped into entering copy previously.

I’m warming to the black bar on the left too.

I had a look in the new folder:
/wp-admin/css/colors

Looks like it wouldn’t really be that hard to write a plugin to allow users to create their own custom theme from within WP with additional options (like the line separator etc), might give it a bash as a personal project if anyone is interested?

You mean like https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/admin-color-schemes/ ?

That one adds additional ones doesn’t it? I was thinking along the lines of all the css classes mapped to a full hex color picker.

I’m pretty sure there have been other similar ones written for older versions of WP so i guess some of these guys might already be updating for the new version so maybe give it a month or two and see if this materializes

Just completed a fresh install.

Colour schemes were a waste of someone’s time if we don’t get to customise them (don’t want to create plugin – customising should be within the Dashboard)
Biggest negative is increased font/spacing sizes … with no way to change them – it would mean more scrolling up and down & eye/head movement … great ‘improvement’!
Not sure it’s worth the effort to see if anything good/useful has changed.

Fortunately, I keep a blank install of every WP version … so I’ll use Duplicator to build my next WP client site on an earlier (more user-friendly) version.

About time the WP crew took a long hard look at the product could be, and stop messing with the interface.

(don’t want to create plugin – customising should be within the Dashboard)

Why do you want colour schemes customisable to be part of WordPress core as opposed to a plugin?

Biggest negative is increased font/spacing sizes … with no way to change them – it would mean more scrolling up and down & eye/head movement … great ‘improvement’!

WordPress doesn’t disable the zoom that’s by default available in your browser.

About time the WP crew took a long hard look at the product could be, and stop messing with the interface.

Here’s where to get involved: https://make.www.ads-software.com/ – Please contribute as there is no “WP crew”.

It’s responsive. Smaller viewport = less columns. Ex: 1650×1080 = 3 columns; Laptop res = 2 columns; mobile devices = 1 column.

What is the number of columns responsive to? I have a desktop and laptop, but with 1024×768 resoulution and I am getting 2 columns. I don’t *ever* want two columns — I don’t have enough screen realestate. Where in the code can I hack this?