Since its inception in 2003, WordPress has come a long way in the last one decade, powering over 23% of the websites on the web, which is an incredible number.
We have done a lot of praise for WordPress in the past, because of the number of amazing features it offers, it is no longer used for creating a personal blog anymore, I have seen amazing websites that are created using WordPress.
There are thousands of premium WordPress themes available for WordPress to get any kind of design and functionality you want.
The only thing I feel bad about WordPress is the limitations in changing the backend as it is almost the same for everyone no matter how big or small, beautiful or ugly a website is on the front end.
Even though I came across a few themes for the WordPress Admin panel, none of them provided simple features such as branding the Admin Panel and making it look the way you want, something which is very important for a multi-authored blog. All they offered was a number of presets that changed the look and feel of the admin panel, but there is nothing you can add or remove from the dashboard.
All they offered was a number of presets that changed the look and feel of the admin panel, but there is nothing you can add or remove from the dashboard.
But recently, I came across this theme on WordPress.org called Slate Admin Theme, which lifts the look of the Admin panel to make it look more modern and soothing.
The interesting thing about the plugin is that it offers a Pro version which is available on CodeCanyon.
It is called Slate Pro and has the following features –
- Changing the looks and feel of the WordPress Admin Panel,
- Replacing WordPress logo with your website logo on Login Pages and in the Dashboard area.
But the feature that made me opt for this plugin was –
- The ability to hide certain things from the Dashboard, for users of the site and even add a few things of your own, such as Guidelines, Instructions etc.
I am currently using it on one of my websites where I invite people to contribute content to the website. This plugin along with User Pro, make it a perfect combination to run a website like this.
We have talked about UserPro in the past, so I am just going to leave a link to the original post, it’s basically a plugin that lets you create front end profiles for users, they can register, login, edit their profiles from the front end of the website.
There are many other features UserPro offers, but I use only the ones I have mentioned above. Rest is taken care of by Slate Pro, which lets you hide things like WordPress icons from the Dashbaord, Update Nags, Varous fields from Post Editor, such as SEO Tool, Slug, Post Format and other fields that are added on activating any plugin.
Items from the Admin Bar (the black ribbon on the top) like Profile, Edit Profile, Screen Options can also be removed for users.
So, you can give access to only the Post Editor and add instructions on the dashboard for contributors to follow, like I did on one of my websites.
Slate Pro is available for $21, which I think, is worth every penny you will be spending on it if you run a muti authored blog.
Download Slate Pro ($21)
