Custom Admin Theme

Our Objective

If you need to make adjustments to the adminhtml theme files (template, layout, or skin), you have two options for accomplishing this.

Here’s an example of what we would want to accomplish:
Files in
/app/design/adminhtml/default/custom_admin_theme/
need to override files in:
/app/design/adminhtml/default/default/

Likewise, files in
/skin/adminhtml/default/custom_admin_theme/
need to override files in:
/skin/adminhtml/default/default/

The following two options accomplish this functionality:

Option 1 – “Admin Theme” module

Ivan Weiler from Inchoo has created a module that allows you to specify your own custom theme using the same config page you use to specify custom frontend themes. You can download this module here (note: this module is currently in Alpha, so you’ll need to modify the setting of your downloader before being able to download it). Here is a screenshot of this module in action:

Option 2 – Add XML to your module’s config file

If you don’t want to install a module just to enable this functionality, you can add the following XML code inside the tag inside the config.xml file of any of your active modules. Alternatively, you can add this XML to your /app/etc/local.xml file. I prefer this option, due to its simplicity and the fact that the store administrator will have no need to update the adminhtml theme from the admin panel.

^?View Code XML

<config>
...
    <stores>
        <admin>
            <!-- custom admin theme -->
            <design>
                <theme>
                    <default>custom_admin_theme</default>
                </theme>
            </design>
        </admin>
    </stores>	
...
</config>

The code above overrides the XML from the /app/code/core/Mage/Adminhtml/etc/config.xml lines 410-422

^?View Code XML

    <stores>
        <admin>
            <!-- default admin design package and theme -->
            <design>
                <package>
                    <name>default</name>
                </package>
                <theme>
                    <default>default</default>
                </theme>
            </design>
        </admin>
    </stores>

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Magento Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Custom Admin Theme”

jason
February 15th, 2011 at 12:32 pm

Thx !

Spent ages looking for this, found loads of wrong ways to do it.
This was simple and it worked

j
Rizvan Vadia
May 18th, 2011 at 4:32 am

First of all thanks to your guys for providing such informative code. I have also search web for this and fond this use full post. Our problem was we wanted it to be worked for enterprise edition. You code was only to overwrite the theme. Which as not working well for enterprise edition. I have added code to overwrite skin as well and that worked.

Thanks again,
Rizvan
Charles
November 18th, 2011 at 2:22 pm

Does this work in 1.6 CE ? I tried it and I can’t get any custom templates to load.
Hugues
December 20th, 2011 at 2:28 pm

@charles, it didn’t work in your Magento 1.6 CE because of the community extension “Find” located in app/code/community/Find.

A quick way to make it work is to either remove the extension, if you don’t use it, or, remove the lines 121 to 129 (included) from the config.xml of the extension:

find

It should work then. Don’t forget to clean your cache.

Hope that helped.

-Hugues
Rizvan
December 23rd, 2011 at 12:44 am

It worked for CE as well. Check for the XML files which loads default theme.
Charles
December 23rd, 2011 at 4:07 pm

Thanks, I’ll try it.

-C

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