Anyone know how difficult this is or the best way to approach it?
I’m basically wanting to strip it down to just the Editor, a few custom functions and getting comment notifications etc. This way people can create content, get notified of comments etc, but
a) it isn’t obvious they are on a Wordpress Admin site and
b) they aren’t overwhelmed by too many functions.
I did the see the wordpress codex on this but that seemed to be basically changing the colors, adding a logo ‘customization’ of the admin panel, what I’m looking for is way more in depth. Thanks in advance!
there are quite some tutorials available on how to customize the admin panel. There are a lot of features you could hide / modify depending on your requirements by just adding code into your theme functions.php
The administration panel can be themed in the same way any blog can be themed. Yep, you can create your own themes for the dashboard. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the Codex is more than obscure when it is related to admin changes (I guess they may be scared of people complaining because they change the core instead of creating a new theme for the dashboard? Don’t know) so you’ll go much further if you Google a bit and find the right tutorial for this.
The plugins in WP repository are a bit short on this too