Feature request – Admin Themes

Hi all,

I’m a long time user and developer on WordPress and so have a fairly good understanding of both the core and plugin environment.

What I’d like to suggest is a new menu under ‘Appearance’ called ‘Admin Themes’. What I’m recommending is actually a 3rd layer of theming i.e. Admin (Normal WP Admin) -> Admin (backend theme) -> Front end (Existing themes).

The purpose is to provide client site admin themes – It’s often the case that you develop a site for an organisation and they need specific menu options for settings in ‘their’ version of WordPress. They need to manage what’s relevant to them and quite often, there’s large elements of WordPress that are irrelevant. The reason I’m suggesting a third layer of ‘theming’ is for regular developers and users of WordPress, the WordPress admin area is reassuringly familiar and, once known, easy to navigate. If you bespoke this layer (as is possible and plugins exist), this site becomes unfamiliar to navigate and administer. The creation of an additional layer of theming allows for the theme access (e.g. What the logged in user sees) to be tied to the ACL (Roles and capabilities), without making applying those same ACL’s to the existing Admin menu structure as this can get really complicated.

How this happens (of if it happens), I leave open to discussion.