Notes on the WordPress admin colour schemes

WordPress has shipped user-selectable admin colour schemes for over a decade. Most people never change from the default, and most plugin authors, reasonably enough, only ever see the default.

The result is a long tail of small breakages. Text that vanishes on Midnight. A custom button that stays blue when everything around it went green. A chart with a hard-coded white background sitting in a dark panel.

The fix is to take colours from the admin rather than declaring your own. WordPress exposes what it is using, and the schemes are consistent enough that borrowing works.

It takes about twenty minutes to check all eight. It is the single cheapest thing you can do to make an admin screen feel like part of WordPress rather than something wedged into it.