Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.I like the work that's been done on Seven, but I'm hoping that it will change a bit for D8. I've got some issues with the name space, but let's keep those discussions over here #1297428: Rename Seven in D8
Jeff's pointed to some of the existing issues with the Seven theme and the need to clean those up #1088792: [meta] Seven theme battle plan for D8
There's keeping up with the evolving standards for all core themes #1087784: Add new theme to Drupal 8.1.x or another minor version & #912458: Design Initiative: Core theme selection and development process - probably a bunch of stuff will get grandfathered, but not everything.
I brought up a bit of a comment in an existing thread (sorry) - #911054: Remove Garland from Core
So I do think it is useful to have a bit of a brainstorm about what we'd want from an admin theme & what other admin themes are offering that Seven doesn't. What are the experiences people are having with Seven now that could be enhanced in D8?
I'd love to have SVG for Seven in a repository so that people could more easily tweak & visualize design patterns & options, but surely there are other ideas out there.
I don't think that the Color module works with Seven to allow for options other than grey. That's too bad. Some folks like colourful fruity themes.
What are it's successes? What type of usability/design evaluation has been done now that it's out in the wild?
Other Admin Themes to look at for inspiration:
http://drupal.org/project/om_admin
http://drupal.org/project/polpo
http://drupal.org/project/rootcandy
http://drupal.org/project/rubik
http://drupal.org/project/admin
It should be functional, beautiful, accessible & in D8 it should also be mobile. Thoughts?
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #12 | Rubik_theme_admin_tasks_icon_categories.png | 19.61 KB | klonos |
Comments
Comment #1
cosmicdreams commentedI see why you suggested CoreAdmin now @mgifford.
Admin is already taken by that excellent module
and Core, well, it will be the new folder for all the core modules.
so perhaps core_admin or core_admintheme would make good sense for the name of the administrative theme for Drupal.
Comment #2
mgiffordYa, Admin is an excellent name.. http://drupal.org/project/administration could be freed up I expect.
Or we just pick something like Seeger, Wilkes, or Keller which is named after someone or something that has had meaning for the community.
For that matter Byron seems like an open project name :)
Comment #3
andypost.
Comment #4
cosmicdreams commentedAs much as I like commemorating a community member with dedicating our administrative to them. I think we should first discuss the intent and purpose of the theme's name.
Currently the name of the theme is "Seven" and, in my view, there is a strong reason to not even rename the administrative theme at all. Everybody who's deployed a Drupal seven site has seen seven. There would only be confusion to those who looked at the Seven theme in Drupal 8 and wonder why there aren't developers who are interested in improving the administrative theme enough to call "Eight".
If our plan is that we aren't going to change the theme all that much then we should give it a name that isn't linked to specific reversion of Drupal. For this purpose, Generic and, hate to say it, boring names would work best. We will want everyone to focus on Bartik and whatever the Design 4 Drupal initiative produces. The admin theme is spartan, sparse, functional even.
So with those guiding principles here are few ideas to get this conversation going:
drupal_8_administrative_theme
drupal_administrative_theme
core_administrative_theme
core_admin
core
c
Comment #5
webchickEr. Wait. Why do we now have two issues for discussing the theme's name in D8? That issue is over here: #1297428: Rename Seven in D8 :) Let's keep the renaming discussion in one spot.
From what I can tell from the OP, the intent of this issue is to analyse the differences between Seven and other admin themes and try and come up with a list of where there are deltas, and then evaluate which of these (if any) might make sense to bring into D8's admin theme. I think there's nothing wrong with performing this analysis. We probably want to be careful though about how dramatically we change things without good reason, though, since unlike the front end theme this is going to affect 90%+ of Drupal sites.
Comment #6
webchickAnd what I mean by that is that unlike the front-end theme, which makes sense to dramatically change each release for a "fresh" branding look, the admin theme should probably incorporate more incremental improvements version over version (note: i am not a designer, but I do get yelled at every time we mess with the admin area :P).
But "Make Seven mobile-friendly" + "Make Seven have a responsive design" sound like an excellent couple of sub-issues as a start.
Comment #7
podarokhttp://drupal.org/project/adaptivetheme
and of cause - Seven
Comment #8
spleshkaFor me best theme is http://drupal.org/project/rootcandy
Comment #9
yaremchuk commentedRubik foreva!
Seems it more user friendly by using beautifull icons than Seven.
I'm not sure about issue of mobile friendly in the topic of admin theme.
Does anybody admin drupal form the phone?
Comment #10
syodash commented+1 for rootcandy
Comment #11
mgiffordYes, I think that comment #4 should be put over #1297428: Rename Seven in D8
My intent with this issue was to talk about what it is that we like about other themes. What should an admin theme have that Seven presently doesn't offer.
I'm not looking for folks to chime in with their favourite admin theme as much as I want folks to talk what it is about the other themes that they like.
Maybe it's images or colors. Maybe it's some of the custom functions that are used to simplify the admin process. Perhaps it is how it works with other contrib modules.
I don't want to engage in a discussion of replacing Seven with another admin theme, but looking at enhancing Seven based on what else is going on in the community.
Contributed themes can evolve much more quickly than core themes can. So, hopefully there are solid ideas from these bouts of inspiration that the core themes can learn from.
I do think that it is more important for Seven to evolve than Bartik because most folks probably swap out a different front end theme anyways. Bartik's great, but Drupal's overall usability will be judged on Seven more than on any other core theme.
Hopefully this clarifies things.
Comment #12
klonosBrowsing Drupal's admin UI as it is now feels like going through a whole user manual. I know that there's a convenient option available right there to hide descriptions in order to get a slightly more clean UI, but still the UI presented to the admins out-of-the-box is overwhelmingly filled with help/explanation text everywhere!
Icons make the (any) admin UI navigation faster and make the product look more polished/refined to newcomers. By faster navigation I mean the fact that they enhance the users' ability to instantly spot task links on the page by visually memorizing their icons. There's also this very helpful article on the matter: Admin 2 + Rubik: Improved UI for Drupal Admins
I love the tabs with icons for admin task categories in RootCandy:
I mostly like how special care has been taken in Rubik to "categorize" the level of importance of each task and then provide the right type of icon depending on this:
Comment #13
johnalbinEither we need some movement on this issue or we should close it and forget about it. There are too many meta-issues in Seven's queue as it is.
Comment #14
lewisnymanThe new style guide has taken on the task of this issue, we can propose changes or additions to the style guide in the g.d.o proposal or the meta issue: #1986434: New visual style for Seven