I’m not a huge fan of the new look of the plugins page of WordPress since the 2.8.x upgrade. The bland colors of both active and inactive plugins seem to run together into one big plugin soup. Luckily, we can change that by altering the default colors on the plugins page with a simple trick.

You can have your plugins page go from this:

(click)

to this:

(click)

Here’s how:

Browse to your theme folder > wp-content / themes / <yourtheme> and open the file called functions.php. If you don’t have one, create a blank document and name it functions.php. Inside the file in between the beginning < ?php and ending ? >, place the following code:

 function wp_pluginscss() {
?>

AND

<style>
.plugins .inactive,.plugins .inactive th,.plugins .inactive td,tr.inactive + tr.plugin-update-tr .plugin-update {background-color:#eee;color:#aaa;}
.plugin-update-tr .update-message {background-color:#ff9;border-color:#f90;color:#727272;}
.plugins .active,.plugins .active th,.plugins .active td {color:#000;background-color:#cf9;}
.plugins .inactive a { color:#69f;}
</style>

AND

<?php }

if (function_exists('add_action')) {
        add_action('admin_head', 'wp_pluginscss');
}

Edit any of the colors within the middle code section to suit your taste.