I’m just doing some research into how the WordPress admin panel might be completely redesigned into a different layout altogether, and wondered if anyone here has experimented with this before?
I’m aware that you can inject a custom stylesheet which can be used to override current styles and move certain things around, but I wondered how it might be possible to use different HTML markup as well?
Any insight or links to articles about it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
I’m afraid you can’t easily change the HTML of wp-admin. Unlike the front which separates logic from visualization, wp-admin scripts contain both HTML and executed code, as you can see in wp-admin/users.php.
You can get pretty far changing the CSS and other reused items like the menu and header/footer. A good number of things you can change is describe in the article How To Customize The WordPress Admin Easily.
Within the WordPress files you have all of the code so you can do with it as you wish. Take a look at the files in the wp-admin folder when you download WordPress. And try searching on Google. Or go the plugin route.
But, why redesign the WordPress admin UI when it’s the functionality on the admin side that matters. When you can create custom post types and use great plugins like custom fields, do you really need to redesign the ui?