Simply wonderful, should be part of the theme

  • Black may well be the new black but, at least until dirty green achieves similar status, those of use who want to use the otherwise very nice Twenty Fourteen theme can surely appreciate this plug-in. It’s not a mere color picker, as it will also calculate other matching colors to accompany the choice you’ve made. That is good. Where it could be better though is if it still allowed the user to change some of the secondary colors, such as the one called ‘accent_dark’. The source code comments itself say (color-patterns.php:364):

    // Darken the accent color, if needed, for adequate (4.5:1) contrast against white page background.
    // Unfortunately, this can result in some colors losing character, such as yellow -> gold.`

    It was really funny to read the above comment in the source code when I went on to edit it by hand because I ran into exactly the situation described. Already a solid five-star but hopefully the author considers allowing us to override more colors in the future versions. It’s my website after all, and ruining it with an ugly color scheme should be my statutory right.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author Nick Halsey

    (@celloexpressions)

    Thanks for the detailed review!

    As the code indicates, it’s difficult at times to achieve exactly the look that you’re going for. Fortunately, it’s easy to override some of the colors via a Custom CSS plugin. The best way to do it is to copy the relevant blocks of CSS from color-patterns.php, add in the color that you want instead of, in this case gold, and paste it into a custom CSS plugin. That way you can still get plugin updates without losing your modifications, and you can override anything that doesn’t quite work for your tastes.

    Since this plugin aims to be a quick & easy solution for most users, I’ve chosen to minimize the amount of options in favor of flexibility with overriding styles via custom CSS. That way it works out-of-the box for those wanting a quick solution, and only requires minimal effort to extend for more custom implementations like yours.

    Thread Starter aqq

    (@aqq)

    Thanks for the reply, and the suggestion! I know I could just edit the CSS directly (in fact I’m doing it anyway, I need a child theme for other reasons) but I like the plug-in too much to just switch it off like that. ??

    So, what I actually just did was to extend the plugin to include one extra color picker, together with a checkbox that allows to switch the automatic calculation on or off.

    I’d love to send you a patch so that you could consider merging it, if you’re interested. Seems to work quite well for me in my usage scenario, although I understand your design decision to keep the number of choices manageable so that no-one feels overwhelmed.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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