In building out a site, I had a cause to use Twenty Seventeen, the new theme for WordPress. I’d tested it before, helping figure out the usability of features. This time I was using it ‘for real’ and as I often say, there’s nothing quite as impressive as ‘for real.’
Overall, I still find Twenty Seventeen as easy to work with as any other theme I’ve used. Customizing a theme to look like how you want is incredibly weird as it’s always a unique experience. This is to be expected. Themes are difficult when we’re trying to guess what people want. They’re second only to search in complex usability. In my use, I found two places where I felt other themes did things better.
Documentation
While there is a technical document on how to theme with Twenty Seventeen there is no walk through. For example, when I use StudioPress’ Genesis themes, every single one comes with a walkthrough of “How to make the theme look like our demo!” Twenty Seventeen has the luxury of the new default content, but even then, it’s not the same as directions. I have to do trial and error to figure out things like how to change the ‘section’ images on the front page.
Answer? Change the featured image. Of course. That was logical to me because I’m an experienced WordPress user. I can’t say it was logical to anyone else.
A great deal of the theme makes sense contextually. By which I mean if you look at it, it all follows and you can suss out what’s next. But it’s not perfect. No theme is. I still think if a simple walkthrough doc existed, it would help a lot of first time WordPress users.
Colors
About a day into my project, I’d used Twenty Seventeen, ditched it for something else, wrote a lot of custom post type/taxonomy code, and then came back to Twenty Seventeen. By the time I did, I had a very clear-cut idea in my head about what I wanted the base color to be.
I have to explain it like that because that’s pretty abnormal, I feel. Most people don’t go “I want to use #d1548e as my base color for links and stuff!” They go “I want pink!” The problem here is that if you look at the color tool for customizing colors, it’s a slider. And worse, it’s a slider without an override.
Now compare that to the picker you get for the Header text color:
Right there I can go in and put my color in hex format and it uses it. Perfect.
I can guess why they don’t have this for the custom color, though. Twenty Seventeen does something special with colors and instead of just saying “Links are pink and headers are magenta,” it uses saturation. This lets the theme create a dynamic color scheme based on your selection. Which is fucking awesome, right up until you’re me (or you try to use the exact same color schema twice).
I want to stress that I do not feel this was a bad choice for the theme. Since the theme is going to use math to cleverly calculate out what the related colors should be for the theme, it’s genius to set the colors on a slider. This puts the concept in your head, when you move the slider, that the colors are relative to each other. It’s a perfect example of seamlessly introducing new users to a tool. It’s actually intuitive.
How I ‘Fixed’ My Color Woe
First I made a lot of jokes with my buddy James about how they would ‘hue the day’ for this one. Because thats how I roll. Then I dug into where the hell this was set at all. Like all WordPress settings, its saved in the database in the wp_options table, under theme_mods_twentyseventeen which has a value like this:
a:5:{i:0;b:0;s:18:"nav_menu_locations";a:2:{s:3:"top";i:2;s:6:"social";i:3;}s:18:"custom_css_post_id";i:-1;s:11:"colorscheme";s:6:"custom";s:15:"colorscheme_hue";i:312;}'
Yours may be longer. The important bit is here: s:15:"colorscheme_hue";i:312
That number, 312, is the color hue! If you change it, it changes the colors. Once I knew that, I had to reverse engineer a hex code into a hue. To do that, I used workwithcolor.com. That site has a color picker, and if you put in the value you want (say d15483 it spits back a whole lot of information.
That part I circled, the 337, that’s the important part. I can now go into my database and change 312 to 337 and magically it works.
But boy that sucks. Instead I used set_theme_mod() to fix it by putting this in my theme’s function:
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'helf_after_setup_theme' );
function helf_after_setup_theme() {
$hue = '337';
if ( get_theme_mod('colorscheme_hue') !== $hue ) set_theme_mod( 'colorscheme_hue', '337' );
}
If I wanted to get fancy, I’d put in a real control for it, but this at least gets me started.
