Journal

Green n Blue - An EE control panel theme

{title}I thought I'd share this. Expression Engine's Control Panel, in the latest version, allows for user (or 'member') theming. I haven't noticed many of them being done so I'd thought I'd share my own. Introducing 'Green n Blue' (how imaginitive is that?!!).

First off let me say that the pMachine team have done a great job with EE 1.3.1. Superb. The control panel, although not to my taste, is well designed and well executed. It predominantly uses CSS for stying which enables the easy use of theming. Nothing new here really considering other blogging tools have had this functionality for a while.

I've tried to slim down the CSS with less images creating gradients etc. and am still working on this, so expect some updates to this theme and who knows maybe I'll get bored of this one and do some more!

Here's some screenshots:

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Instructions

  1. Download the greennblue.zip (24kb) file and unstuff.
  2. Put the whole folder in your /themes/cp_themes/ folder.
  3. Log into your control panel and go to My Account > Control Panel Theme and select 'greennblue' from the drop down menu.
  4. Then go to Admin > System Preferences > Control Panel Settings and select 'greennblue' from the drop down menu.
  5. Enjoy!.

Comments

Looks really nice, unfortunately I don’t use Expression Engine.

Yannick L.'s Gravatar

Yannick L.
Sat 13th Aug 2005
at 7:36 pm

Looks really hot Mark, it’s a shame I can’t afford an EE license :( Maybe it could be ported to Wordpress?

garrett's Gravatar

garrett
Sat 13th Aug 2005
at 7:59 pm

Mark: What turned you on to Expression Engine over other platforms such as WordPress?

Gerard McGarry's Gravatar

Gerard McGarry
Sat 13th Aug 2005
at 8:20 pm

Looks awesome, I’d love this for MT.

Jeff Wheeler's Gravatar

Jeff Wheeler
Sat 13th Aug 2005
at 8:38 pm

Gerard - I decided because of one feature EE offers over it’s competitors: Custom Fields. With EE you can define your own custom field sets for each blog, therefore it’s easy for EE to run sites which aren’t just blogs, like this one, which has a portfolio and stuff.

Mark Boulton's Gravatar

Mark Boulton
Sat 13th Aug 2005
at 8:43 pm

I built the Scribble Designs site using WordPress. It has a facility to add ‘pages’ which can exist outside of the blog, but retain the same template. So far, I’m pretty impressed!

WordPress offers something similar to custom fields, but I think these are done per post. I’ve no need for them personally - what do you use them for?

Gerard McGarry's Gravatar

Gerard McGarry
Sat 13th Aug 2005
at 8:50 pm

Good stuff. We’ve been playing around with the CP CSS for a while - it’s a big jumbled mess and looks about two years out of date, but - as you say - it’s easily customizable, in a “here’s OUR CMS for you, Mr. Client” kinda way ; )

Mark, you seen all the new plugins? Cron-tastic. DB backups, cache emptying, auto emails to admins etc - give it a few more months and EE will be delivering absolutely every wish.

Our faith is definitely in the right engine - and I know you know that by now…

Colly's Gravatar

Colly
Sun 14th Aug 2005
at 12:01 am

I’ve just installed it, and it looks great! Nice one. I like Colly’s idea of applying a specific theme when using EE as a CMS for clients.

One point, on step 2 of your instructions, the folder actually needs to go in /themes/cp_themes

Nik

Nik's Gravatar

Nik
Sun 14th Aug 2005
at 7:37 am

Mark: Textpattern also does custom fields (10 of them) - and it’s free!

Matthew Pennell's Gravatar

Matthew Pennell
Sun 14th Aug 2005
at 9:12 am

I like that a lot very nicey done. Big fan of EE.

John Henry Donovan's Gravatar

John Henry Donovan
Mon 15th Aug 2005
at 10:58 am

Matthew - Yeah and it’s finally been released as a stable release now hasn’t it? I did look at Textpattern very closely before I commited to EE (I did use MT prior to that). I also looked closely at Wordpress.

The thing is I wanted to learn, and use, one CMS platform for the majority of my work - from this site to client work. EE fit that bill extremely well. If I was just designing this site, I probably wouldn’t have invested in EE, but at the time I had other stuff on and I needed to commit to a flexible platform.

Dead happy with it too. EE is the business!

Mark Boulton's Gravatar

Mark Boulton
Mon 15th Aug 2005
at 8:58 pm

When EE can natively pass variables between templates (without a hack) it will be everything I need. Love it otherwise!

Allan White's Gravatar

Allan White
Tue 16th Aug 2005
at 6:30 pm

Great CP Theme Mark.  I like it a lot. 

As to EE versus the others.  As far as flexibility it has the others beat completely.  TextPattern allows 10 custom fields.  EE doesn’t have a limit.  Want 10 different blogs/database sections displayed on the same page?  Piece of cake.

I’ve been so happy with my switch to EE.

Jamie

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Jamie Poitra
Tue 16th Aug 2005
at 7:20 pm

What does EE cost at the moment?

Gerard McGarry's Gravatar

Gerard McGarry
Tue 16th Aug 2005
at 8:21 pm

EE costs $199. Very well worth. The Discussion Forum is an extra $99.

Brandon Blatcher's Gravatar

Brandon Blatcher
Tue 16th Aug 2005
at 8:26 pm

Gerard - The non-commerical licence is $149.95, the commercial licence is $199.95. The Discussion Forum module is extra.

Worth every penny considering the functionality.

Mark Boulton's Gravatar

Mark Boulton
Tue 16th Aug 2005
at 8:28 pm

Fantasitic job on this theme… I wasn’t a big fan of the 1.3 cp overhaul, but this makes it much more enjoyable.

Thanks!
Jesse BC

Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain's Gravatar

Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain
Wed 17th Aug 2005
at 12:51 pm

What a great theme - makes using EE even more enjoyable. Txs for the great work, Mark. markus

Markus's Gravatar

Markus
Wed 17th Aug 2005
at 1:39 pm

Has anyone here played with Symphony21 yet?

Sean Scott's Gravatar

Sean Scott
Wed 17th Aug 2005
at 3:16 pm

Very nice them. Refreshing to have a different look as I spend so much time in the control panel. I initially like dthe new look after it’s release but find it a bit too heavy at the moment.

So, your theme is very much welcomed ;-)

Sintra's Gravatar

Sintra
Thu 18th Aug 2005
at 12:51 pm

Sean - I haven’t used it in anger yet. I’ve had a play with the demo. Sure, it looks nice enough but I haven’t got the patience to try learning any of it’s tags and syntax when I’m just getting going with some of the complex stuff in EE.

Mark Boulton's Gravatar

Mark Boulton
Thu 18th Aug 2005
at 7:36 pm

Hi Mark - just a short note and thanks for your great theme. It really is great to use and I get the feeling it loads a lot quicker too. Light and nimble. :-)

Brad's Gravatar

Brad
Fri 19th Aug 2005
at 7:43 am

No problem Brad, glad you like it.

Mark Boulton's Gravatar

Mark Boulton
Fri 19th Aug 2005
at 7:01 pm

I noticed that EE has changed themes in their latest version. There was no cp_themes folder in my cp/themes folder so I created one and uploaded the folder. Still not working, any ideas?

thanks very much!

Hadley Stern's Gravatar

Hadley Stern
Fri 19th Aug 2005
at 8:45 pm

Hadley - The cp_themes folder isn’t in the system folder, it’s in the directory above called ‘themes’. Just to confirm, you are using version 1.3.1 yes?

Mark Boulton's Gravatar

Mark Boulton
Sat 20th Aug 2005
at 8:33 am

Mark - I’ll have to take a look at EE.  I have been looking for an industrial strength CMS.  One that has some of the legwork already done but is pretty customizable without feeling like you need to learn Mandarin to master it.

Something that also works on multiple dynamic language would be ideal (CFMX, PHP, Ruby?)

Sean Scott's Gravatar

Sean Scott
Mon 22nd Aug 2005
at 2:32 pm

Hi Mark,

I’m using 1.3.1. and I am in cp/themes

Is that the right place?

hadley Stern's Gravatar

hadley Stern
Mon 22nd Aug 2005
at 2:45 pm

Hadley - No, you need to be in themes/cp_themes. Outside ouf your system folder.

Mark Boulton's Gravatar

Mark Boulton
Mon 22nd Aug 2005
at 3:34 pm

Any Chance of porting this to WordPress Admin ?

Sadish's Gravatar

Sadish
Wed 24th Aug 2005
at 5:26 pm

Thanks Mark, got it! That purple was driving me bonkers, your design is much...fresher.

And for the people asking about Expression Engine it is simply an awesome product. Very powerful, quite easy to use, and a great development and support community.

Hadley Stern's Gravatar

Hadley Stern
Wed 24th Aug 2005
at 6:45 pm

Sadish - I’m afraid I can;t spare the time, maybe you should?

Hadley - Glad you like it. There’s a few small bugs I’ll be ironing out over the coming weeks - be sure to check in for updates!

Mark Boulton's Gravatar

Mark Boulton
Wed 24th Aug 2005
at 6:58 pm

Just wanted to say thanks for releasing this, Mark. Your weeding through the default template mess of multitudes of colors and images saved a lot of time for me and I finally got around to customizing my cp using your cleaned up version as a base. Many many thanks!

And, do feel better.

Mike Kroll's Gravatar

Mike Kroll
Fri 26th Aug 2005
at 1:22 pm

Hi. I bought a license for EEPro a few months back...but it’s still in moth-balls.  ( hard to get weaned off of pM;-) ) I have just download EEcore (free) in order to get started to learn by designing a simple web-site for a friend. It will not be a blog but a general site. I am looking for tutorials that will help in getting started to design a non-blog EE site. Any ideas?  ( i have already visted and gone through Colly’s great photo gallery tutorial)

Cheers and all the best in the new year!

walter's Gravatar

walter
Fri 30th Dec 2005
at 10:58 pm

many thanx for the greenblue skin. managed to install it in ten seconds.... EE?? Sweet!

walter's Gravatar

walter
Fri 30th Dec 2005
at 11:05 pm

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A picture of Mark BoultonI'm a graphic designer from near Cardiff in the UK. I've been a designer for over ten years now and primarily work on the web. I'm still partial to a bit of print every now and then though. I used to work for Agency.com in London as an Art Director before working as a Senior Designer for the BBC in sunny Cardiff. This was all before I took leave of my senses and formed my own design consultancy, Mark Boulton Design Ltd.

I've got a thing about grids and typography and occasionally ramble on about them to anyone who will listen.

If you're after simple, clean and effective web design; let me know.