Update: The smaller images now click onto LARGER versions for your viewing pleasure.

For the past year the Shuttle team has been working on the beautification of the WordPress administration panel. The original team was just going to be myself and a couple of coders (Chris and Joshua) who were going to take the designs I came up with and make into a reality. Luckily Michael was having the same thoughts at the time and so he joined our rag tag team. In a cunning move he brought in the inimitable Joen to the fold as well. So now we had enthusiasm (me), flair (Michael) and experience (Joen) along with Chris and Joshua ready to kick some coding ass and take names. That young upstart Veloso joined us half way through the year to add some insight and youthfulness.

Matt caught a whiff of this and though we were forking, which obviously we’d never dream of. So we invited him to oversee where we were going with all of this. Meanwhile Steve was working on his Tiger admin panel half way through our design, and as you can imagine the stakes got raised ever so slightly. Unphased we continued to plow through. Email after email, mockup after mockup.

Version 2.0 was released and the first signs of the work we’d done on Shuttle began to appear. No they weren’t exactly how we mocked them up to be honest (you can blame us for the blue colours and the collapsable tabs on the side though). A year is a long time and we were pretty determinded to finish this off by the end of January. We blew that deadline, but the desire was still there.

As of today we’ve officially completed Wave One of the Shuttle project. I effectively took all the work we’d done so far, all the things we’d talked about and tried to come up with a cohesive solution. Just hammering page after page. I’m not really sure were it all came from, but I guess it was mainly due to the fact that we’d sat on this for so long that is was time we just dealt with it all.

Here are a couple of images for you to have a look. I’m working on a mini-site to show all the work done so far.

Just to stress a few things, these ARE NOT THE FINAL mockups. I have changed a great deal since our last working mockups. The boys now have the psds and will hopefully be tweaking and doing their magic to try and pull everything together. How much of this makes it into the final WordPress install is really dependant on Matt. The boys and I will be talking at length about our design decisions in the near future; we’ve got enough emails to troll through to find hot contested parts etc.

So for all those wondering about the status of this project, that’s where we are right now. I for one see this as a HUGE milestone since we’ve been working on this for over a year now and it’s good to find some form of closure. I know it’s never really over, but at least I believe it’s a step in the right direction.