Rename Gin-based admin theme

Tonic. Meaning "giving a feeling of vigour or well-being; invigorating", which is what the new theme is doing to Drupal, and nothing to do with something you might serve with Gin.

Renaming is mostly to help out development and debugging. Grepping “admin” keyword generates too many results.

We could have a “Drupal theme”, but, then again, grepping “Drupal” generates too many results.

Also, as I understand, in the future we will not be able to switch admin theme from the UI, as with many other PHP platforms.

Here are a few suggestions that I think can be worth considering:

• “Core” theme,
• “Theme” theme.

We can also force compound with machine name like:

• “admin_theme”,
• “admin_skin”.
• etc.

Those are all suggestions.

I propose something like Sapphire

Yeah I personally prefer something less generic such as #2 and #4 the problem is it will probably be very difficult to get a consensus on one.

But there's got to be something better than "admin", especially considering https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3556948#comment-16491504 - there will undoubtedly be contrib admin themes that subtheme the core one with their own flavours.

I do quite like Tonic

The next steps after adding gin are:

• #3555047: Core should ship with only an admin theme
• #3528104: Remove UI to change admin theme

At that point the name should be moot

At that point the name should be moot

I disagree, as stated above there's nothing stopping people from adding their own admin theme in contrib or custom. And from a developer experience, admin is awful for finding stuff. Also having admin: admin in system.theme is odd

It would be short-sighted to assume that we're not going to want to replace this admin theme in 5 or 10 years. What do we call it then? admin2?

It would be short-sighted to assume that we're not going to want to replace this admin theme in 5 or 10 years.

We might but there's also the possibility that we keep refining it over 5 or 10 years and don't have to do a full replacement, especially if we add and improve user customisation of fonts etc. In an ideal timeline we'd have done that with Claro and not be replacing it now.

Renaming is mostly to help out development and debugging. Grepping “admin” keyword generates too many results.

I'm struggling a bit to imagine where this would be an issue. Can someone provide examples for when this might be? And I do also think that now, that all PHP code is in namespaces classes, this should even be less of a problem. What am I missing?

+1 for giving the theme a real name.

I do not really care what it is, as long as it is not "admin" (nor the suggestions in Comment #3). "Admin theme" is a description, and if we are allowed to change it (whether or not we can do it through the UI) we should be able to name what we are changing it to.

Weren't Olivero and Claro named after designers? Surely we can find another one.

I'm struggling a bit to imagine where this would be an issue. Can someone provide examples for when this might be?

The main cases I can think of are code searching to find references or things like mass-renaming. e.g. if you search contrib for Gin or Claro you can probably find some references. The Gin to Admin conversion probably did a find and replace for gin to admin that wouldn't be reversible (because there'd already be the word 'admin' in a lot of places).

"drupal_admin"? It's generic enough and describes what it is while having an underscore to make it easier to search for in code.

The unique names like Claro, Gin, etc. are nice though.

Checking out main and searching for admin, I get 20000 results across 1982 files.

TTFKAG (acronym for "the theme formerly known as Gin").

+100 to renaming this.

However, before the UX people / product managers get bent out of shape that "Admin" is truly the right thing to put in the UI, we could at least have something deterministic and unique for the machine name and still call the human-readable label "Admin" (if that actually is a good idea in the UI). Especially if #3528104: Remove UI to change admin theme is on the near-term roadmap, and "the name should be moot", then please can we rename the machine name to a string that doesn't already have 20,000 hits when greping the source tree? If the label is still "Admin", I can shrug and bear it. But having the machine name as admin is definitely a DX disaster, regardless of your opinions / beliefs about the UX benefits.

Thanks!
-Derek

If the main concern is greppability we could do admin_theme which is redundant and less aesthetically pleasing but a lot more greppable.

+1 please.

It seems like there's some level of consensus around giving the theme a machine name different than admin.

I believe it will be very hard to find the new name collectively, because our community will seek perfection and there's too much subjectiveness in choosing a name IMO.

Can we please just ask Dries (or someone else) to pick a word and run with that? Anything will be better than admin.

How about default_admin (since that's what it is, or will be)?

That works for me.

default_admin is very greppable, 2 hits in core and 45 across contrib. default_admin

If this is consent, I'd be happy to work on this. Just one question for clarification: the directory themes/admin should also be renamed, or just the info file and the namespace?

I would expect the folder to be renamed

if we stick with a compound name, let's use:

drupal_admin

i share the same opinion as benji in #11. i do not really care about the name, the only constraint from my end i would prefer it would have a proper name and not using a name describing a role/attributes. those attributes can be communicated otherwise via the ui (for example #3249370: Move the active Default and Admin Theme to a new section on top of the Appearance page and #3249374: Redesign the cards for the Appearance page).

After the changes to remove the OOTB support for changing the admin theme, It might make sense to no longer to show the theme in the UI.

If we use either drupal_admin or default_admin, it seems to open up the floor for alternative admin themes. However, I personally don't think we need to optimize for that. Our modules are named after functionality too even though they can be replaced by similar functionality in contrib / custom modules.

What if some time from now the theme will feel outdated and a new admin theme is created.

Are we going to replace the admin (or default_admin) admin theme? This will most likely break all customizations and additions that will be added to contrib and custom projects.

Or name it admin2 or new_default_admin?

What about just calling it gin? Views and media were also contrib projects. Moving projects into core while keeping the name is perfectly possible.

I like default_admin.

What if some time from now the theme will feel outdated and a new admin theme is created.

Are we going to replace the admin (or default_admin) admin theme? This will most likely break all customizations and additions that will be added to contrib and custom projects.

Or name it admin2 or new_default_admin?

I don't think this is real problem - it's not like we're preventing a theoretical future admin theme from having a unique name by calling this one default_admin. But also overall the goal here is for the admin theme to evolve gradually over time rather than get frozen for 5-7 years then replaced (which we've done twice now).

This is ready for testing and review.

Updating the issue summary with to match the changes I see in the MR.

@quietone your latest update to the IS needs a bit of a clarification:

Change theme name from "Admin" to "Default Admin"
User facing text about the theme uses "Admin".

The name of the theme (I guess this is in info.yml?) is also user facing as it's shown in the appearance screen to enable and configure the theme. I'm wondering where we should use "Default Admin" or "Admin". Please help me clarify this.

Let's change the user facing name for consistency. 👍

OK, I've updated the MR so that all user-facing strings are now calling it "Default Admin", and the IS has also been updated accordingly.

From what I can tell renaming is working.

+1 from me!

+1 from me too.

Committed/pushed to main and 11.x, thanks! Reviewed the files that actually had changes rather than pure renames.

I didn't reallly know what to do with issue credits here so I leaned on the stingy side..