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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.
