3.8 admin panel design is very bad

Second topic about wordpress admin panel design. First one was removed. May be, it’s not a feedback forum? Oh, no, it is. Then why?

If you want to criticize and provide feedback then that is of course fine. Just please do so without the expletives.

Ok, sorry. Too much emotions after update : )

Passion can be good but let’s try to keep the conversation civil. You’ll influence more people that way. ??

You can change the colour scheme to something lighter when you edit a user.

None of the colour schemes suit me. I cannot see light type on a dark background
the fonts are too large.
if you use a theme with lots of widgets, then the widget panel in 3.8 is total mess with difficulty in moving, dragging and dropping widgets etc
all in all the admin panel should have an option to allow users to revert to 3.7.x style which works perfectly for me & others

Yup, there should be option for reverting to clean and clear 3.7 style.

With this new update, font size is out of control, and the black on white design kills my eyes…

I’m on WordPress sites publishing content for most of my day.

I have to constantly scroll around which takes me more time. Aren’t updates supposed to make things easier??

I could give a flying flip about WP back-end aesthetics. (Which, by the way the last 3.7 style looked great.) All I can think of is how much more time this new design is stealing from my day.

And don’t even get me started on the new black bar with white font. White font is harder on the eyes. I tried changing in users setting, and agree there should be a way to select clean black font with white background!

My very strong guess is that there will be some plugin that will restore the old style. From millions of users there will be some percentage who does not like this ( change ?? ) and at least one of them will be a dev and code a plugin.

I personally love it. For my eyes the font is super easy to read. It all has contrast now easy to see sections, widgets, menu items … The gray background and the white input fields on top of it just looks so good ??

To me the new style is eye-candy to me. I somehow understand the where the thoughts coming from when they say this is 90s, because it may look like DOS, Norton Commander or just old to them. But if you really look at it, there was no Open Sans in the 90s and its really modern to have no shadows, no rounded borders and just flat simple style. I think the did a superb job with this.

I even understand more if people no like the black bars, if this is the case just to edit your user and select the ‘light’ theme. If your not instant happy then try it at few days and lets see if you really want the old style back or its maybe just the dark bars.

Also the https://jehy.ru/articles/wp-content/uploads//fluency_writepost1.jpg screenshot you posted has only one similarity with the 3.8 style and this is the black bars. It’s really ugly, there are worlds between this and the 3.8 style!

As a specific criticism, all of the icons look flat and/or washed-out in all of the color schemes *other* than the default “black and white” (which is too much contrast, way too harsh, and way too dark for my eyes) ??

So the choice is apparently “harsh and dark” or “washed out and blah” ??

I miss the separators, everything just runs together now. Those line between things really helped me know where I was. I’m using Woo Commerce and the only color scheme that works right is the dark.. I really would like the option for the old color scheme until either Woo fixes their color schemes or you allow me the freedom to choose what I would like the admin area to look like

Thanks for the hard work, you just missed it on this one

Mark

The admin UI in 3.8 is fantastic. The MP6 integration turned out just awesome. I’m sure it won’t be long before there are plugins for those who want to tweak things beyond the already available per-user options. For anyone interested in some of the thought processes and development: Make WordPress Core > MP6 — 3.8 Proposal

Well if nobody will come up with plugin to set admin design back to good all days I’m going to be one of those folks with coding skills and preference for 3.7 admin design. Not that I care but my clients will surely do and they going to give me hard time about this unwanted unrequested change…

Why not leaving the option for 3.7 design even if its not default. I mean its all good to move forward but you need to leave option to roll back especially when you have like 1M+ blogs around the web who are willing to keep up with bug fixed and so on, but don’t want to get their admin interface ruined :/

Did you introduce WordPress to them as a constantly-updating technology right at the start? You can use that explanation to fall back on. I can see it can be a problem if the clients think you’re in control of the software behind their site though.

It sounds like an IE6 situation where your clients continue to use the worse version because they’re familiar with it “and it works just fine”, no strawman intended.

Yeah, it is odd that they don’t somehow leave folks a 3.7 skin for the site, or didn’t set one up b/c it doesn’t seem to me that it would be that difficult to set up. Still…

Mosin Mark, it’s pretty easy to reskin the admin. You can make a simple plugin to add separating lines between menu items, or alter the admin however you like.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Menu Separators
*/

function menu_seps1() {
?>
<style type="text/css">
#adminmenu li.wp-has-submenu,
#adminmenu li.menu-top-last {
	border-top: #313131 1px solid;
	border-bottom: #181818 1px solid;
}
#adminmenuwrap {
	border-top: #181818 1px solid;
}
</style>
<?php
}
add_action( 'admin_head', 'menu_seps1' );
 ?>

You can fiddle with the colors to make them a bit different, but the above code should add separators for you.

Most clients especially not in IT field have little knowledge about WordPress or software life cycle in general. The only thing they care is their website and that it works and the last thing they want is update on something they already got used to. As I said earlier, its not an issue for me, but for many of my clients it will be and thats the problem that seems to be not address when introducing the change without a option to stay with old theme.

WordPress is very popular CMS and drastic visual changes will definitely affect a lot of people, so was it that hard to include old theme as an option and let people choose? I guess not, but it seems that development is focused more on developers then on end users who prefer little (NOT DRASTIC) changes over the time.