I originally thought we’d have completed Shuttle a while back. Alas that has not been the case. I don’t want to say I underestimated the work, but rather, the project itself evolved into so much more than just a tweak to the css file. The reason I thought I’d talk about this is because of the recent releases of two excellent admin beautifications for WordPress. Both SpotPress and the Tiger Admin skins are excellent examples of how the current default admin can be improved upon.

I love the fact that Joe made SpotPress into a plugin, just shows how versatile the WordPress architecture actually is. Steve Smith has kindly jumped into the whole issue and knocked it completely out the park with his Tiger Admin Skin. See if the man had released this 5 months ago, honestly I wouldn’t have bothered with Shuttle and I bet it would have eventually made it into the core WordPress admin, much like Kubrick made it as the default theme for WordPress. The Tiger admin modification has seriously enhanced my WordPress user experience. It’s very subtle and slick all in one.

The thing is though, we’re actually making some progress with Shuttle. It’s not finished, hell the coding hasn’t even started yet (well not exactly, those of you that are on the ball with regards to WordPress development might have picked something new up…). There is a lot of work that still needs to be done, however as some people have come to understand, we’re not just talking about modifying a css file. The project is a great deal more involved than that. This project tackles functionality as well as beauty and when it’s released a few more issues you might be surprised about.

I suppose I wanted to make sure everyone understood that we’re completely and utterly behind this project and while I love Tiger, I can’t wait for the day I start using Shuttle, simply because to me it’s more WordPressy. A natural progression of the WordPress Admin interface.

I must say that the Tiger admin panel definitely pumped me up for tackling the project full on and trying if anything to solve those dead ends we’ve been hitting. It’s been a very busy couple of months for many of us, and as such the project has taken a hit. That’s being rectified. I wish I could give a date when this is going to be released, but I don’t see it happening for a good few months to come. Maybe September sometime might be a good target, really depends on a number of factors.