Works are progressing really well with the new Joomla admin template we are building. Niche Studio has produced some quite advanced drafts. We think they are doing a great job. The overarching principle has been to reduce the clutter all over the page compared to the current Joomla 1.5 and particularly at the top of the page. This is somewhat selfishly motivated in my case by my use of a MacBook Air with it's very limited screen size. Why waste 5cm at the top of the screen with empty space?

We've opted to move most of the top menu links to a left menu as well with the Dashboard link the only way to get to the Dashboard - no more duplicated links at the top. So, as you see, we are not just rearranging the deckchairs but doing some radical surgery to vastly improve the usability of Joomla admin.

Please do tell us what you think. We'll be moving to a final draft during the next week and then building the extension towards a beta to play with in the next month.

Example Images

In the list view, our goal has been to remove any action items like edit or trash to become exposed on mouseover. We'll do this with the Order up/down arrows as well.

The Bulk Actions include Publish, Unpublish, Archive and Trash.  After I received such a warm response from Wordpress advocates after saying in my blog we would include some of their approach in our new template, I'm sure they will be more than happy with the divergence in design style (aside from the Bulk Actions).

 The article editing view gets a similar makeover with a simplified look as well. The same style will be used for the right side controls throughout the template too.By default, the HTML Editor controls will be simplified as well.

What do you think? Are we headed in the right direction?

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