A lot of people have been asking me about what I think about the new WordPress admin that’s coming for version 2.4. No actually I am telling big fat porkie lies. No one has asked me what I think, but I’m not going to let that stop me. Lets talk the new WordPress admin shall we.

Swiped directly from the demo site that can be found at hyper123, this is what the glorious new WordPress admin in version 2.4 is starting to look like. I say starting to look like, because you can see that they’ve got a while to go in sorting out all the breakages everywhere. In fact by Matt’s own addmission, it’s only 10-20% complete, which is why they’ve decided to wait until March to release this version, because obviously they’re not there yet.

Now obviously i’ve got a slight bit of interest in what’s going on in the admin, simply because I (and others, whom I really shouldn’t speak for) gave a year’s worth of our free time (more or less) to the creation of a revamped admin panel for WordPress. The powers that be, (well Matt actually) didn’t like it, which is why it never got included into the core.

So nearly 2 YEARS after the efforts that we did on that particular project, we are now finally getting a new administration panel design. Others seem to have tried and failed as well (the likes of Brian and i believe some other Automattic employee, I’m not into the WP community since they went commercial). Is this the thing that Happy Cogs have produced? I’m not sure.

Obviously they’ve decided to go away from the colour scheme that was introduced due to the Shuttle project. What you think the blue that you see came from somewhere else? Yeah no. The other thing that has changed, so far, is the dashboard. Last thing that I can see is the comments now have a number at the top to tell you how many comments in moderation or whatever. Apart from that nothing to report really.

For my money however, this is really like putting a bandaid onto a broken leg. Seriously. It’s past the time for this. This would have been bloody relevant several years ago, not now. Now, well it’s completely outdated and anything less of a complete and utter redesign (and that includes rethinking how your menu structure actually works) if you want it to be something relevant, fresh, exciting and ultimately usable by the widest range of people….but in that case you might as well start from the beginning and building something truly new and exciting…oh wait we’re already doing that.