Different theme for user frontend vs. admin / moderation area

[qc]

Hi @all,

when implementing a new responsive theme for our community (a quizduell forum, quizcommunity.de), we decided not to touch the administration and moderation area but to spend our limited time on improving the end user (read: normal forum member) experience only.

The only solution I found was to modify the SMF source, i.e. Sources/Load.php and add an additional IF statement to the loadTheme() function, switching back to the original SMF theme when accessing moderation or administration related pages:

Code Select Expand

if (isset($_REQUEST['action']) && in_array($_REQUEST['action'], array('admin', 'moderate', 'splittopics')) {
  $id_theme = ORIGINAL_THEME_ID;
}

Other forums (Vanilla) or frameworks (Wordpress) all have their own separate admin panels with their own invariant layout and design, which saves a lot of time for theme authors.

Did I overlook something or is there really no other way to implement such a split between end-user and admin theme apart from modifying Sources/Load.php? If so, this might be an interesting feature request for future SMF releases 

How did you deal with the admin area?

[Kindred]

There is no such switch in the smf design...

Most them authors don't touch the admin templates, which means that it uses the default templates...  Of course, with the custom theme's CSS...  But properly designed, that means that the admin gets to be responsive as well.

[qc]

Thank you for your reply !

But properly designed, that means that the admin gets to be responsive as well.

...for some simpler modifications of the default theme, this is certainly true. But if the theme relies on more than just CSS changes, the template files of the admin area need to be modified, too, and that seems very time consuming to me. A proper responsive design of the admin section will require a lot of thought and time to be spend on the little details to get it right - and still woudn't match the user experience of the desktop.

Here is an example from our (bootstrap based) SMF theme - the frontend looks fine:


...while the backend has all kinds of issues:


Therefore the aforementioned 'switch' in Load.php. I wonder if I am the first theme author that had this kind of issue... which usually would mean that I have a flaw in my process and there might be a more elegant solution?

[Kindred]

I use one of bloc's themes, called studio003
The admin template is pretty responsive without any further edits.

So, yes...  I think you are the first person to worry about it