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This one’s called a “Plug-n-Hack” because it relies on a lot more than just the basic plugin to work. It requires careful layout of your blog’s theme and editing the plugin in order to work correctly.

But for those of you who are running sites where you’d like to be able to keep the overall structure of individual blogs the same, while allowing your users to make some adjustments to the color scheme, this may be just the solution. With the Theme Styles Plug-n-Hack, you can create new color schemes as the administrator and offer them to your users to select from.

The plugin itself is very basic. All it does is add a new style element to the wp_head when the site loads. The elements within the style must be the same IDs and classes as you use regularly, because the new declarations will override your default settings for color. As such, it is imperative that before working with this plugin, you take stock of your current color scheme and determine how many colors you work with ordinarily and how many of those you’ll want to change. For example, my site uses five basic colors not counting the text, which I decided would always stay the same color.

Once you’ve determined what colors you’re going to change, you need to start creating a second style sheet (which will eventually replace the one in the plugin) that calls each of the affected elements and declares only those attributes which are related to color. By way of example, in my case:
#top_nav_1 {
background:#CD2626 none repeat scroll 0%;
border-bottom:1px solid #FFCC00;
border-top:1px solid #FFCC00;
}

Now that you have this list, you can begin to replace the RGB color codes with PHP substitutions. The plugin is currently setup to recognize five color variables:
$darkest, $dark, $medium, $light, $border
These variable names made sense to me, but feel free to edit the plugin to change them, if you prefer. Go ahead and start putting in your substitutions where they fit. In my case:
#top_nav_1 {
border-bottom: 1px solid <?php echo($borders); ?>;
border-top: 1px solid <?php echo($borders); ?>;
background:<?php echo($dark); ?>;
}

Now you can go ahead and insert that style list in place of the one in the plugin, starting at line 33 of the theme_styles.php file. Note also that at line 23, some default values are set. You’ll want to switch these around to your theme’s default colors! Defaults are also set for the admin area at line 208.

Once all this is done, you can upload the theme_styles.php file to your /plugins folder and test it out. By activating the plugin, you create two new menu items: one is for Site Admins only, which is located under the Site Admin tab and allows you to either create new styles or change the values of existing styles; the second allows users to select from the styles you’ve created and is located under the Presentation menu.

With a little bit of editing, I think you’ll find this a welcome addition to your website.

2 comments so far (is that a lot?)

Summary:  Returns an array of all users who have Administrative roles on a given domain.

Detail:  This function checks the database for all Site Admin users on the specified domain ($sitedomain and $path).  The returned value is an associative array of usernames and passwords.  This function works not only site-wide but across multiple domains, if you’re environment is set up in that way.

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Summary: A companion function to the switch_to_blog() function, this function takes the settings stored in the temporary array setup by switch_to_blog() and swaps them back, thus restoring the original blog.

Detail: This very simple function simply undoes what was done in the switch_to_blog() function. It restores the settings to the $wpdb function and user roles that were held in the temp array setup by the switch_to_blog() function.

As previously noted in the switch_to_blog() post on this site, you cannot expect the temp array to hold more than one blog’s settings, thus if you are iterating over several blogs, you’ll need to either continuously use restore_blog() to get back to the original blog in between iterations, or else use switch_to_blog() to go back to the original, ignoring the temp array altogether.

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Summary: Toggles all settings to a different blog’s settings, thus allowing you to perform functions as though you were on that blog. Stores the current blog’s settings in a temporary array, so they can be restored when desired.

Detail: This function switches all the settings in the $wpdb object to the new blog ($new_blog), while also updating the current user’s role as per the new blog. The end result is that all operations performed after using the switch_to_blog function will behave as you would anticipate if you were on that new blog. You would presumably use this function along with the restore_blog() function.

This is probably the single most important and strangely, least-used function in the WPMU platform. The advantages of using switch_to_blog are many. For one, it saves you the trouble of having to rewrite the database blog prefix (wp_24_posts, for example), and instead let’s you query the dB using the same pseudonyms you would use in any WordPress setting ($wpdb->posts). For another, you can use all the standard, built in WordPress functions such as get_permalink() exactly as you would in any other setting. Best of all, because it stores all the current blog’s settings in a temporary array, you can quickly restore the settings without a lot of complex coding.

Additionally, since the user’s roles are carried over, and because you’re using the standard WordPress functions, information normally not visible to a user remains invisible without complex coding. For example, if you want to display the most recent posts from a given blog, you can simply switch to that blog, use the get_posts() function to perform whatever tasks you’d like, and switch back. In doing this, you can avoid showing posts from private, spam or adult blogs. Moreover, on each blog, you can eliminate the possibility that visitors could see private or unpublished posts, or that posts set to be visible only to certain user levels. However, users who do have the proper privileges on that second blog will be able to see those additional posts. Thus you can write supple, flexible plugins that play ball with most available plugins on all public blogs. No additional coding is required, nor are lengthy database queries.

A word of warning: do not attempt to use this function to iterate over a variety of blog ID’s hoping to restore the original blog’s ID at the end, unless you switch back to the original blog in between. At first, I thought that this would be possible, but it is not. Thus, swapping back and forth between several blogs would need to be done like this pseudo-code:

switch_to_blog(4)
. . . do some stuff . . .
restore_blog()
switch_to_blog(5)
. . . do some stuff . . .
restore_blog()

2 comments so far (is that a lot?)

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The WPMU Site-Wide Latest plugin provides two widgets for your site. The first, labeled “Newest Post,” creates an 80-word teaser of the single most recently published blog post on any public blog across the entire site. The second, called “Recent Posts,” creates a list of the most recently updated blogs with their most recent posts, one post per blog. Both plugins provide a vehicle for those using the standard Gravatar plugin to obtain and display the Gravatar of the post author in each case.

The teaser widget takes the post title as the title of the widget, whereas the listing widget allows you to set your own title. Both allow you to ignore blogs, if you wish. The list widget also allows you to specify how many blogs you want to display and an offset. This is in case you use both together, that way the most recent comment is in the “Newest Post” widget and the next most recent begins the list in the “Recent Posts” widget.

The plugin also uses the WP-Cache, and both widgets allow you to set a time-out.

WP-Functions Used in This Plugin:

switch_to_blog()
restore_blog()
wp_cache_set()
wp_cache_get()
get_permalink()

Installation:

Unzip, upload (to either /mu-plugins or /plugins, your preference), activate and configure. Simple as that!

4 comments so far (is that a lot?)