Mawu installs like any other WordPress plugin, with no account, license key, or configuration required to see it working. Here’s the full path from install to your first dark screen.
Install and activate
- In wp-admin, go to Plugins → Add New Plugin and search for Mawu Dark Mode.
- Click Install Now, then Activate.
- That’s the entire setup. Nothing needs configuring to start using it.
From the command line, WP-CLI does the same in one step: wp plugin install mawu-dark-mode --activate.
To install by hand instead, download the zip from Mawu’s WordPress.org page. Then upload it through Plugins → Add New Plugin → Upload Plugin, or unzip the mawu-dark-mode folder into /wp-content/plugins/ and activate it from the Plugins screen.
Pick your theme
Go to Users → Profile and scroll to Admin Color Scheme. Mawu and its 12 companion themes, from the Nature and Hero collections, appear in the same list as WordPress’s own built-in schemes. Choose one and save your profile. The change applies immediately to your own account only.
Configure the optional extras
Visit Settings → Mawu Dark Mode to turn the block editor, Classic Editor, and login screen dark styling on or off. The block editor and Classic Editor options are on by default; the dark login screen is off by default, since it affects a page every visitor to wp-login.php sees, logged in or not.
Nothing site-wide, by design
Every admin on a multi-author site picks their own theme independently, and there’s no setting that can force a theme onto everyone. The one exception is the login screen, which has no logged-in user to read a preference from, so it gets its own separate, site-wide theme choice. See the full Settings walkthrough for what each option actually controls.