Rocket Dashboard: Give Your Dashboard A Facelift

Published

April 25, 2013

4 Comments

Yesterday Matt Jones of Storefront Themes announced via his blog that his Rocket Dashboard plugin is now available for free download! We like free, a lot, so we thought we’d take a few minutes and check out just what Rocket Dashboard has to offer.

Rocket Dashboard is a plugin that offers a fresh take on the WordPress dashboard, updating some of the colors as well the icons. It’s pretty simple but it certainly gives the dashboard a fresh new skin.

I thought I’d install in on my personal blog just to see how much of a difference it makes.

Install was a breeze. It worked right out of the box and just like that my dashboard got a face lift. I really like what Matt has done with the menu on the left hand side. I’m a big fan of charcoals and dark grays on the web, so kudos to Matt here. I also like that he reserved black on white for the main content window only.

What I’m not a big fan of is the green and red for the Admin bar at the top of the page. This reminds me of Christmas and I find it completely distracting. This color combo should be reserved for awesomely terrible sweaters, not the web. This wouldn’t be a big deal if there was a way to change these colors in the plugin settings without having to hack the CSS.

But this is a free plugin and with Matt even admitting that it’s a stop-get measure until WordPress does this themselves, I can see why he saved the time and didn’t make changing those colors an option.

So if you don’t mind the green and red for the admin bar, it’s a great little plugin. It’s not going to change your life but it will bring a nice little face lift to the otherwise unremarkable WordPress Dashboard.

Are you looking forward to an upcoming facelift for the dashboard? If so, what are you hoping to see?

There are 4 comments

April 26, 2013 #

Matthew Jones

Thanks for the tip here Cam! I’m going to write in an update with the option to change that just for…actually it’ll be for a couple of others too as you’re not the first person to not like the green in the toolbar…I think the problem is not so much the green as it is the green and what you are seeing as red (my screen shows it as brown). I was copying some bootstrap styles for it, so I’ll just include some of the other 9 gradient options for navbars that I include with the Skematik Theme at http://skematiktheme.com.

Also, to clarify the future of the plugin, I think I may update it when the new admin comes out with more ability for developers to use to easily make a custom dashboard that is somewhat unique for their company. A lot of people who love WordPress would wonder why we’d want to change up the look since so many third party plugins are built for WordPress’s specific UX, but in my experience so far, my customers have liked having a look that is more tailored to their company…especially since it doesn’t really affect the main window which is where most of the third party customization is done. That way it won’t conflict with other plugins and is really a win-win.

Again, thanks for the tip and the post! I really appreciate the new presence that you guys have in the community!
May 2, 2013 #

Rudd

Have you tried DP Dashboard plugin by Devpress.com? I really recommend it. However, it’s not a free plugin.
May 8, 2013 #

Mathew Porter

Ive seen this blogged about elsewhere and it does make things look that bit nicer, but cant say it ads a great deal… On another note it does look very similar to the admin update WP.org have demoed for the next major release.
- May 8, 2013 #
  
  Matthew Jones
  
  Yeah, it’s not really supposed to add anything…for me it was a pet project just for my own sites and then I realized that a couple of developers wanted something similar so that they could just edit the css to make it look more custom for their clients. As far as the similarity to the new look coming out for WordPress, all I can say is that I made this in November so I’m pretty sure I got there first but I’m glad they’re doing what they’re doing and I think their design will be totally responsive so it’ll be better for everyone. Thanks for even taking the time to notice it though! 🙂 I appreciate any comments about it.

How do you stay on top of your WordPress game?