Written by Kyle Ledbetter Comment on this post
16 March 2010
Why do we create alternate Joomla! admin templates?

To Solve A Problem

That's the point of design in the first place. A problem or set of requirements is presented and a design attempts to solve it.

Innovation and Creativity

The Joomla! admin hasn't progressed much at all from the original Mambo admin. After a certain amount of time, it's perfectly nature for the Joomla! community to step in and make the necessary change. This was the reason behind the original AdminPraise 1. We were frustrated with the lack of admin updates and workflow nightmares, so decided to make our own admin. Kudos to the Joomla! core team for having thing foresight of adding a template layer to the backend (lacking as it may currently be). Arguably updating the admin template shouldn't fall on the core team and the thriving Joomla! community SHOULD pick up the challenge.

Much like CCK components such as K2, FLEXIcontent & Zoo are stepping in to improve Joomla! content capabilities, we're working hard to improve the Joomla! admin panel. We're not alone either, JoomlaBamboo and Udjamaflip have also started developing alternate admin templates.

Joomla! Admin Evolution (not much change since Mambo)
joomla-evolution

WordPress Admin Evolution (most changes over time)
wordpress-evolution

Drupal Admin Evolution (biggest change with Drupal 7)
drupal-evolution

Observations from other Content Management Systems

Drupal has always been accused of having the least intuitive admin. With Drupal 7, they are taking a huge step forward. The Drupal 7 User Experience Project was formed to work with their community to fix the Drupal admin problem. The process itself has been criticised a bit, but the fact that tons of time and communication were involved shows that they recognized the problem and wanted to fix it. How did this start? Alternate admin tools and themes such as the Drupal admin menu which is the main feature of Drupal 7's new admin.

WordPress took another route and hired a professional firm for their admin update, but the fact that they addressed the problem as well still stands. WordPress has by far been the leader in the number of big admin updates. It's obvious that user experience is a priority, which is probably why you always hear that people think WordPress is "easy".

Innovation trickles into the core

We're interested in making Joomla! better, bottom line. We'd like to change the entire core Joomla! admin theme, but that could potentionally be very disruptive. Instead we've submitted our Activity Log extension to the core of Joomla! 1.6. The is arguably the most useful advance we've made and will be a nice addition to 1.6's admin. If we didn't create alternate admin templates, innovations like this wouldn't occur.

Debunking some myths

The largest opposition to alternate Joomla! admin templates has been professional Joomla! trainers and authors. Their stance is that alternate admin templates make the current Joomla! training books and tutorials useless. The only reason the existing training material may become useless is that Joomla! becomes so intuitive and easy with alternate admin templates, that the problem is fixed and training is no longer required. Once you learn Joomla!, changing admin templates just gives you a fresh look at the same content and workflow improvements. The only pain we've seen is when users have used our AdminPraise templates for a short while and must go back to the default admin. While they can still get around fine, they realize how much time AdminPraise saves them in their daily Joomla! usage.

Jen Kramer, a well respected Joomla! author and trainer has referred to alternate Joomla! admin templates as "dancing bears" in a recent post, implying that alternate admin templates are just for novelty and attention. We of course couldn't disagree more. Alternate Joomla! admin templates are an absolute necessity and are paving the future of Joomla! Would you rather the Joomla! admin never improve and stay the same for all time, just so training materials don't have to be updated?

User reviews of our free admin template AdminPraise Lite seem to think that alternate admin templates are a good thing and they don't really complain about screenshots not matching up to their Joomla! books exactly.

What do you think? Are we providing a necessary service to the Joomla! community with our Admin Templates or just providing an fun distraction?

P.S. This blog post was written using K2 and our Stainless admin template, optimized for K2 :)
stainless-used

Last modified on Tuesday, 16 March 2010 18:36
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Kyle Ledbetter

Kyle Ledbetter

Kyle is the creative director and lead designer of AdminPraise templates.

He dreams up these crazy ideas and the awesome team helps execute them.

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