Admin theme development

I have been looking into upgrading our admin theme, as the current one is way out of date (no mobile support for instance). I made some good headway working out the theme_admin.html template, but once you want to go and change some more detailed parts such as the way the content of the ACP blocks is rendered, I'm hitting a wall.

It looks like the template overrides don't work in the context of the ACP. I'm going through some debugging sessions at the moment to try to figure out why that is exactly, but that is a major roadblock in getting a new, fresh admin theme out there.

To be continued

How are you attempting to override the admin theme? I know a theme can add another option to the admin theme selector. I’m not sure how to override an existing admin theme. 

I create a new theme without theme.html, but with theme_admin.html as main template. That part works well, I can have the overall structure of my page defined by that template. The ACP page content such as adsense can also be themed. I'm still working on re-theming the table component, but that's just figuring out how to understand those admittedly very complex theme files.

The only thing I haven't been able to get to theme are the blocks. But the start page of the ACP is only made out of blocks, so it's quite a big deal if I want to have a modern-looking and inviting first impression

If the reflex theme is still working, there are template overrides for blocks in it -

\themes\reflex\modules\system\blocks\

Alas, no. The reflex theme doesn't really define new blocks that are used in the ACP part of the admin theme. It defines a new CSS that gives the existing layout a fresh coat of paint, but nothing more than that. I'll try to dig up an ancient version of the new theme MrTheme started working on several years back, he did a total overhaul if I'm not mistaken. Let's see if I can get it working on 2.0 RC1.

I was wrong on the theming for the pages : the Adsense page for example does not take into account theme templates. It does work with a different template defined in a template set, so I'm taking that route for the moment.

I am working on the mockups in plain HTML, that works easier than directly in Smarty. it's coming along quite well for a first iteration.