i stayed up late working on integrating and refining the standalone Money Manager EX plugin inside my Windows 95 WordPress theme.

When I went to use plugin on one of my websites, I initially received a message saying that Money Manager EX was not active and that I needed to install and activate the standalone plugin. At first, this looked like a possible integration problem, but I discovered that the standalone plugin simply was not active. Once I activated it, the Money Manager shortcut began working correctly. This also confirmed that the theme’s plugin-detection warning was functioning as intended.

After opening Money Manager, I noticed that its teal background was the same color as the Windows 95 desktop. This made the application blend into the surrounding desktop and made the window feel less distinct. i changed the Money Manager workspace to the classic Windows 95 light gray and changed the icon labels to black so they remained easy to read. The blue window title bar and the rest of the Windows 95 styling were preserved.

I also wanted the Money Manager window to be smaller because the original 1,180 × 760-pixel window looked awkward and took up too much of the desktop. i initially reduced it to 1,050 × 650 pixels.

While preparing that update, i discovered that the ZIP file I had supplied as the theme contained an entire WordPress installation rather than only the theme. A clean installation package was created containing just the win95-desktop theme folder. This made it a proper theme ZIP that could be installed through the WordPress Themes area.

I renamed the WordPress post displaying the plugin to “Financial Dashboard.” I wanted a title that described the workspace without repeating “Money Manager EX,” since that name was already displayed in the blue window title bar.
The window still looked too large, and it required scrolling to see all the launcher icons. I tried reducing it to 940 × 600 pixels and changed Money Manager so it would calculate its height from the embedded window instead of the full browser viewport. I also compacted the Financial Dashboard heading and tightened the icon grid.

That attempt introduced a new problem: all the icons disappeared, most of the window became blank, and the window was still opening too large. The cause was that Money Manager measured the embedded window while it was still hidden. Because the hidden container had no measurable height, the application incorrectly set its desktop height to zero. The theme could also retain a previously maximized window state, which prevented the new smaller dimensions from being used.

I fixed both problems by preventing Money Manager from accepting a zero-height measurement, adding live resize detection after the window becomes visible, and clearing any stale maximized state when the shortcut first opens. We reduced the final default window size to 820 × 540 pixels while keeping it resizable.

The final version worked. The icons are visible again, the gray Money Manager workspace is clearly separated from the teal Windows 95 desktop, the window opens at a much more comfortable size, and the launcher screen no longer requires unnecessary scrolling.