I am always looking for easy ways to white label the WordPress administration for myself and my clients. A nice personal touch for each project and an easy way to declutter the interface.

These are my personal favorites, that I use on a regular basis.

Admin Themes / Login Page

There are a lot of solutions out there, but many break easily and are really heavy to load. Some of these solutions I tried also break easily on new WordPress Upgrades. The first two below are currently my favorites.

1. Slate Pro ( Commercial )
   „Slate Pro is a powerful WordPress admin theme plugin that reimagines WordPress with a clean and simplified design. White label your WordPress install with custom colors, a custom login screen, custom admin branding, and more. Slate Pro is now multisite compatible! Network activate to control the look of all sub-sites.“
   
   Slate Pro is a clean and simple admin theme, that does not try to alter the interface completely. Small changes that make a difference. Color adjustments, logos, simple menu & widget enhancements and login page tweaks. Compared to other solutions it has been a stable experience, even after multiple WordPress Updates.
   
   This is an install and enjoy solution!
   
2. Kodeo Admin UI ( Free – Open Source )
   „Kodeo Admin UI turns your WordPress backend into a clean and modern user interface. All elements are well designed and arranged for the best user experience.“
   
   Kodeo is another clean interface, that goes further than Slate Pro. Many areas of the admin theme have been changed. It works well with most 3rd party plugins, but I have had problems with some plugins doing their own little interface tweaks.
   With Kodeo your WordPress Admin completely transforms and gives it a really modern & clean look.
   
   This is an install and tweak solution! You might need to trim certain CSS properties to make it work for everything.
   
   
3. Material WP ( Commercial )
   „Material Design version of the WordPress Admin Interface“
   
   I have used this once or twice in the past. Its more of a honorable mention. The admin theme transforms the interface completely, but can feel sluggish on slower servers. It has an impressive set of options and gets regular updates.
   
   This is again an install and tweak solution! It works with most of the 3rd party plugins and Gutenberg, but some things might need to be trimmed by hand.

Menu Editors & User Groups

When sharing the administration with your customer, you often need to make it as simple a possible for them. Depending on your setup, the menu becomes cluttered and overwhelming really fast.

I often trim menus for each user role, to make only those options accessible that are really needed.

1. Admin Menu Editor Pro ( Free / Commercial )
   This tool has been part of many of my projects and has been a solid solution for years. You can hide & move menus, create new menus, tweak menus by user role, hide plugins and also tweak the admin toolbar with an extra addon.
   Worth every penny! There is a free version available, that might just provide enough functionality for your next project.
   
2. Groups ( Free )
   „Groups is designed as an efficient, powerful and flexible solution for group-oriented memberships and content access control. It provides group-based user membership management, group-based capabilities and access control for content, built on solid principles. Groups is light-weight and offers an easy user interface, while it acts as a framework and integrates standard WordPress capabilities and application-specific capabilities along with an extensive API.“
   
   This plugin allows you to add new user groups easily and can tie into the plugin above.

User Profiles

When sharing the administration with multiple users, its always nice to add some personality to the user profiles as well.

WP User Profiles
„WP User Profiles is a sophisticated way to edit users in WordPress.“

The plugin provides other small addons, like WP User Avatars. Neat plugin to tweak admins, editors and other users.

Admin Dashboard Replacements

1. cubicFUSION Admin Enhancer (Free)
   
   
   This is a new plugin I am currently working on. The current shortcodes addon can help you integrate dashboard widgets into the dashboard builders below.
   
   I am also working on my own dashboard builder, that requires none of the solutions below and builds upon WordPress core functionality.
   
   
2. Dashboard Welcome for Elementor (Free)
   
   
   “Dashboard Welcome by PowerPack Elements gives you full control over the WordPress welcome panel using Elementor.
   
   You can personalize the dashboard with content and design built with Elementor. You can add heading, contact information, form, video, images, affiliate links, etc.
   
   While the above plugin is free, you need a Elementor Pro License to use it!
   
   
3. Dashboard Welcome for Beaver Builder (Free)
   
   
   “Welcome by Beaver Addons gives you full control over the WordPress welcome panel using Beaver Builder.
   
   You can personalize the dashboard with content and design built with Beaver Builder. You can add heading, contact information, form, video, images, affiliate links, etc.”
   
   Even though the plugin above is free, Beaver Builder is a commercial plugin!
   
   
4. Divi Dashboard Welcome ($22)
   
   
   “Divi Dashboard Welcome gives you control over the WordPress Dashboard Welcome screen …”
   
   The plugin requires the Divi Page Builder. Both plugins are commercial!

Enjoy
Alex

Together with my partners in crime (Dorit & Micha), we have finally opened our own personal online store.

We have been selling our single origin coffees (1st Single Malt Whisky Coffee, Basic – Single Origin Arabica, Kill me Quick Espresso -Single Origin Robusta), teas (Kräuterschorle – Kräutertee, Feuerkieker – Schwarztee) and rum (Fortune Teller – Double Aged Barbados Rum) using the Amazon Marketplace for the past 2 years.

No more Amazon

GreenApe has been a side project for the past years and I never wanted to deal with the maintenance of our own store. But its time to move on and do our own thing. Amazon has removed so many useful features over the years or added a new fee on top of other fees. Even though Amazon provides access to a large amount of customers, for small companies the fees build up quickly.

Our own

With our own store we can finally do bundles, coupons again and better optimized shipping. It will also allow me to better testdrive some new interesting features for my customers ;) Yeah its kind of my new toy or shopping lab! Its fun being able to work on untested new SEO features, structured data, merchant tools, shopping ads and tracking of all of those.

Locations

We have been selling in Germany for the past 2 years, but that might be changing in the future depending how well the new store shapes up :)

If you live in Germany, love good coffee, tee or rum … say Hi!

GreenApe – Makes Your Life Better
Homepage
Shop
Contact us

A nice set of CSS3 Animations that can be easily used to spice up your design.

The animations can be triggered through Javascript, jQuery and the timings can be tweaked through pure CSS. The package also provides gulp, so that you can tweak every aspect easily.

Demo
Github

Visbug is an amazing new browser extension that allows you to do a visual inspection of your website in development.

What they have to say about their tool and capabilities

• Point, click & tinker
• Edit or style any page, in any state, like it’s an artboard
• Hover inspect styles, accessibility and alignment
• Nitpick layouts & content, in the real end environment, at any device size
• Leverage adobe/sketch skills
• Edit any text, replace any image (hi there copywriters, ux writers, pms)
• Design within the chaos: use production or prototypes and the odd states they produce, as artboards and design opportunities
• Design while simulating latency, i18n, media queries, platform constraints, CPUs, screensize, etc
• Make more decisions on the front end of your site/app (a11y, responsive, edge cases, etc)
• No waiting for developers to expose their legos, just go direct and edit the end state (regardless of framework) and execute/test an idea

For Designers & Content Creators

A really nice tool for designers & content creators, helping them to optimize the look and feel of a website.

The extension is currently available for Chrome, but a Firefox Addon is in development.

Github
Chrome Extension

An icon font to use with the Google Maps API and Google Places API, using SVG markers and icon labels.

Map Icons makes Google Maps Markers dynamic with control over shape, color, size, and icon easily changed using options in the marker object as well as simple SVG Notation and CSS.

GitHub / Preview