WordPress Administration Theme

WP Admin makes the Drupal administration look like the WordPress admin. Yes, on purpose.

Some editors spent years in wp-admin and do not want to learn where Drupal keeps things. This theme gives them what they know: a black admin bar, a dark left menu, white list tables, and "Howdy, admin". Their muscle memory is respected. Your sense of propriety is not.

Underneath, it is still Drupal. WP Admin is a Claro sub-theme, and the left menu is core Navigation in costume. Uninstall it and the only thing lost is the evidence.

What's in the box

• wp_admin, the theme: the dark left menu, list tables, notices, and the edit screen's "Publish" box.
• wp_admin_bar, a module in modules/: the black admin bar across the top of every page. Outside the admin theme it replaces Navigation's sidebar, because WordPress shows only the bar on the front end. It has to be a module, since a theme's code only runs on pages that theme draws, and the bar goes everywhere.

The theme requires the module.

What it changes

• Admin menu: Navigation's sidebar, 160px wide and dark. The current section is highlighted in blue with its submenu open, other sections fly out on hover, and it collapses to 36px.
• Admin bar: site name, "+ New", and "Howdy, name" on every page, for users with "Access navigation bar".
• Front end: no menu, just the bar. On an entity's page it shows "Edit", with the entity's other tasks under it.
• Page headings: the page title with local actions beside it, like "Pages" next to "Add Page".
• Tabs: primary tabs become the nav-tab row. Secondary tabs become "All | Published | Drafts".
• List tables: operations dropbuttons in a table cell become inline row actions that show on hover. In the content, media, people, comment, block and file lists they sit under each title, which the theme arranges in the views' configuration when it is installed and puts back when it is uninstalled.
• Login screen: the login, password reset and registration pages, in a white box on a grey page, with "Lost your password?" underneath.
• Muscle memory: /wp-admin and /wp-login.php redirect to the Drupal pages that do the same jobs, including the familiar screens like edit.php and plugins.php. nginx sites need two lines of configuration for the .php addresses; see the README.
• Notices: status messages.
• Edit screen: the Classic Editor layout, with the "Publish" box at the top of a 280px sidebar. Gutenberg is not included.
• Settings screens: forms built on ConfigFormBase get the label on the left and the field on the right.
• Postboxes: details elements and dashboard module blocks.

The menu works out the current section from the longest menu link path the page sits under, so /admin/structure/types/manage/article/fields counts as Structure. Pages with no menu link of their own fall back to their list: /node/* to Content, /media/* to Media, and so on.

Requirements

• Drupal 11.4 or later
• Navigation (core)

Installation

composer require drupal/wp_admin
drush pm:install wp_admin_bar
drush theme:install wp_admin
drush config:set system.theme admin wp_admin

Front-end themes

The admin bar is fixed to the top of the window and pushes the page down by its height: 32px, or 46px below 783px wide. A theme with a fixed or sticky header can keep it below the bar with top: var(--wp-admin-bar-height, 0). The bar also sets data-offset-top, so --drupal-displace-offset-top includes it.

Known limitations

• Admin pages are laid out for 1024px and up. Below that, the admin bar's menu button opens Navigation's own drawer, recoloured, in place of the left menu. Nobody ever loved the WordPress mobile admin either.
• gin_toolbar points Navigation's top bar template at Gin's under every theme. WP Admin points it back.
• Plugins are still called modules.

How this theme is built

Much of this theme's code and documentation was drafted with an AI coding assistant (Claude Code). The maintainers review, test and take responsibility for every change, and the code checks run on drupal.org's CI. Contributions follow Drupal's policy on the use of AI when contributing.

Supporting this theme

Developed and maintained by Tyler Brown Cifu Shuster of FivePaths, LLC. Development sponsored by FivePaths.