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Victor Hugo Garcia
Victor Hugo Garcia

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Xperience Community: Admin Styles

If you spend your day inside the Xperience by Kentico admin, you already know the little things that get in the way. Scrollbars that feel clunky in Windows, a tab panel that gets cut off when your browser window isn't tall enough, an empty column eating up space for no reason. None of these are big problems on their own, but they add up over a full day of work. That's why I built Xperience Community: Admin Styles, a Chrome extension that smooths out those rough edges without touching anything under the hood.

It's a small tool with a simple promise. It only injects CSS to change how the admin looks. It doesn't read, collect, or transmit any data, yours or anyone else's. The source is fully open, so if you want to see exactly what it does, you can go check for yourself.


Implementation

Getting it running takes about thirty seconds. The easiest way is through the Chrome Web Store. Search for Xperience Community Admin Styles, or grab it directly from the extension page, and click Add to Chrome. Once it's installed, it activates automatically whenever you open any Xperience admin page. No setup, no configuration, no restart required.

If you'd rather run it from source, that works too:

  1. Clone or download the repository.
  2. Open Chrome and go to chrome://extensions.
  3. Turn on Developer mode using the toggle in the top right corner.
  4. Click Load unpacked and select the folder you downloaded.
  5. It activates automatically on any Xperience admin URL, same as the store version.

Key Features

Slimmer scrollbars

The default browser scrollbars in the admin are large and visually heavy, and they don't exactly match the polish of the rest of the interface. This extension replaces them everywhere with thin, modern scrollbars similar to what you'd see on macOS. They stay hidden until you hover over a scrollable area, then fade back out once you move away. This applies across the whole admin, including sidebars, content areas, and dropdowns.

Tab bar that actually scrolls

When you're editing a page, the right hand panel shows several tabs: Preview, Content, Page Builder, Used in, URLs, Properties, Docs. If your browser window isn't tall enough, some of those tabs get cut off with no way to reach them. This fix makes that panel scroll vertically so every tab stays accessible, without touching the rest of the layout.

Empty column cleanup

Every once in a while, Xperience renders an invisible placeholder column next to your content area. It's blank, but it still takes up space, and it can make the layout feel off center or waste screen real estate for no reason. This fix collapses those empty columns automatically, so your actual content fills the available width the way it should.


Compatibility

The extension works with Chrome, Edge, Brave, and any other Chromium based browser. On the platform side, it works with any version of Xperience by Kentico whose admin is served at a URL containing /admin/, so there's nothing specific to worry about in terms of version support.


Conclusion

Xperience Community: Admin Styles won't change how you build with Xperience by Kentico, but it will make the hours you spend in the admin a little more comfortable. It's an evolving toolkit rather than a single fix, so more styling improvements and quality of life tweaks will keep landing over time as they get identified. If you run into something in the admin that bugs you every single day, contributions are welcome.


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