As it relates to how my plugins look, my new approach (for the ones I’m getting ready to release shortly) is to make them look decent out of the box, in the default WordPress 2.0 theme, and then just add enough in the way of IDs and class names to make it as easy as possible for people to customize if they aren’t using the default theme.
My thinking on this is that I don’t really think there’s any good way to provide for many complicated style rules out of the box without making it more difficult to customize when the user does want to use an alternate theme. So, what I think the best approach might be is to make it OK (without much or any CSS) for people who are totally uncomfortable messing with their themes, and then for those who ARE into that, they may have to tweak it a little bit to make it fit, but they will have to do that on everything; that’s just part of choosing a different theme.
What do you guys think?
2 Comments
Have a control panel page where they select the colors, similar to the shoutbox plugin. Then have an advanced CSS where the user can edit the stuff they cannot edit within the panel, stuff rarely customized that aren’t just colors.
Good idea, but most of the stuff I’m thinking of is rules that are specifically related to more detailed changes in the way the lists appear, like margins, padding, borders, etc.
As for color tweaking in particular, ideally (IMHO), any well designed theme will already have overall rules about what color links should be, and some general rules about how lists and titles in the sidebar (and most other common page elements) should look, because these things should be consistent in a good theme. Then there is the other issue I have with the styles being defined in two different places using two different techniques.
That being said, I think maybe you’re still right, in that there are a lot of people out there who are interested in playing with various themes but not interested at all in playing with CSS, so maybe the best of both worlds would be an admin page that lets the user edit some easy properties (like colors and maybe some others) along with a checkbox option to ignore all those tweaks for the people who actually want to let the theme CSS manage the whole style of the site.