If you’re a developer who routinely hands over WordPress sites to clients, along with a list of instructions on things to ignore (ie. upgrade messages, irrelevant menu items, etc), then you need to consider white labeling WordPress and branding it for yourself. More than likely your client doesn’t care a hoot about WordPress and all its infinite geekery. They will appreciate a simplified interface that helps them get exactly where they need to go. Now you can completely white label the WordPress dashboard and login screen in a matter of minutes with this new free CMS tool:
White Label CMS WordPress Plugin
This plugin was created for developers who want to be able to make the WordPress dashboard easier to use for their clients’ CMS needs, eliminate confusion, and brand the CMS product for themselves.
Features and Benefits:
Ability to remove navigation menus for user roles of editors and below (perfect for clients!)
Ability to quickly tailor navigation menus using 3 configurable CMS profiles: Website, Blog or Custom
Remove all panels from the dashboard
Add your own ‘welcome’ panel to the dashboard
Customize the head and footer logos
Customize the login logo
Hide the nag update
Quick Start Instructions:
Download and Install White Label CMS WordPress Plugin
Go to Settings >> White Label CMS and customize everything through the dashboard
Check out the developer’s video to see the White Label CMS plugin in action:
WordPress is very powerful. However, there’s no need to confuse the heck out of your users. Personalize their experience and not only will they feel more comfortable with the products you create for them, but they will value the product more. More details can be found on the plugin’s homepage where you can also offer suggestions for what you’d like to see in the next version.
Fully integrated with the SEOMoz API, complete with automatic links, sitemaps and SEO optimization of your WordPress setup - this is the only plugin you need to help you rank your site number 1 on Google - nothing else compares.
Now there's no need to pay for a third party service to sign up, manage and send beautiful email newsletters to your subscriber base - this plugin has got the lot.
It's now incredibly easy to start your own Q&A site using nothing more than WordPress - The Q&A plugin simply and brilliantly transforms any site, or page, into a perfect support or Q&A environment.
Out of all the WordPress ecommerce plugins available, this has got to be the winner - easy to configure, powerful functionality, multiple gateways and more. A simply brilliant plugin!
To get a wiki up and running you used to need to install Mediawiki and toil away for days configuring it... not any more! This plugin gives you *all* the functionality you want from a wiki, in WordPress!!!
Would you like to add Facebook comments, registration, 'Like' buttons and autoposting to your WP site? Well, The Ultimate Facebook plugin has got that all covered!
If you've ever wondered how you could offer a paid site management and hosting service, then this is the plugin for you. Offer a freemium or paid service, for any niche you like, it's powered Edublogs.org to success already!
If you're thinking about starting a paid, or just private, membership site then this is truly the plugin you've been looking for. Easy to use, massively configurable and ready to go out of the box!
Sarah Gooding is a partner at Untame LLC, a boutique digital marketing firm specializing in open source content management systems and social networking architecture. Get in touch with her on Twitter @pollyplummer
18 Responses to How to White Label WordPress and Brand it as Your Own CMS
Echoing what Jose asked, have you been able to use this on WPMU installations? From what I can tell it’s only for regular WP Admins to set the settings for regular WP Editors.
Do yall have a hack that allows yall set the settings for *all* users?
Thanks for this article Sarah, we really appreciate the positive feedback we have been getting from everyone about the plugin.
In answer to most peoples questions, I have just tested in on WordPress MU, and it seems to work.
The rebranding aspect works, and when I logged in as an Editor, I could only see the menus I assigned to editors.
However, we are not experts in WordPress MU, and would love to hear your test results, and would really appreciate it if you share any workarounds to any problems you encounter, so we can incorporate them into future versions.
If you have any suggestions on how to improve the plugin, please post them on our White Label CMS page.
Although this plugin makes branding easy I did see two issues in the movie where it still shows it is a WordPress CMS.
First of all, on the dashboard in the Right Now field it states that you are using WordPress 2.9. and you need to update and I can see that you use the WordPress default theme and no widgets.
When you logout and place your mouse over the image above the login screen the tip shows the word WordPress.
Two things that might be edited in an update of the plugin.
May 27, 2010 
If you’re a developer who routinely hands over WordPress sites to clients, along with a list of instructions on things to ignore (ie. upgrade messages, irrelevant menu items, etc), then you need to consider white labeling WordPress and branding it for yourself. More than likely your client doesn’t care a hoot about WordPress and all its infinite geekery. They will appreciate a simplified interface that helps them get exactly where they need to go. Now you can completely white label the WordPress dashboard and login screen in a matter of minutes with this new free CMS tool:
did you use the plugin on WPMU?
Great post. Thanks a lot.
Looking good! We’ve been thinking about rebranding our WordPress installations for a long time now.
I’ll definitely give this plugin a whirl to see how it holds up.
Echoing what Jose asked, have you been able to use this on WPMU installations? From what I can tell it’s only for regular WP Admins to set the settings for regular WP Editors.
Do yall have a hack that allows yall set the settings for *all* users?
Thanks for this article Sarah, we really appreciate the positive feedback we have been getting from everyone about the plugin.
In answer to most peoples questions, I have just tested in on WordPress MU, and it seems to work.
The rebranding aspect works, and when I logged in as an Editor, I could only see the menus I assigned to editors.
However, we are not experts in WordPress MU, and would love to hear your test results, and would really appreciate it if you share any workarounds to any problems you encounter, so we can incorporate them into future versions.
If you have any suggestions on how to improve the plugin, please post them on our White Label CMS page.
Thanks
Brian
I might try this for my own use – my script for creating a basic WP site only uses about 10% – 20% of the admin options.
Wow, this is great! I’ve been using the branded-login-screen plugin, but this is way better.
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Although this plugin makes branding easy I did see two issues in the movie where it still shows it is a WordPress CMS.
First of all, on the dashboard in the Right Now field it states that you are using WordPress 2.9. and you need to update and I can see that you use the WordPress default theme and no widgets.
When you logout and place your mouse over the image above the login screen the tip shows the word WordPress.
Two things that might be edited in an update of the plugin.
Other than that it looks excellent!
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This plugin works on our homepage, but when one of our blog users logs in to their site, they still see the WordPress branded admin section?
Hey Dan,
Our plugin has been designed and tested on WordPress only, not WordPress MU.
We welcome any ideas on how we could get this working in MU and would consider releasing an updated version in the future for MU users.
Hope that answers your question.
Cheers.
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Seems like an awesome plugin you got there. But i have a question, is it legal to whitelabel wordpress as your own system?
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Thank you for this plubin. Since the upgrade to 2.5, most of the options stopped working!
Anythings that has to do with uploading am image has stopped working, such as White Label CMS.
Before I was able to put the images in my theme/images folder, but that option is gone and the upload image does not work.
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