Colorset selector

[Don Chambers]

Another crazy idea from yours truly!!! lol

We have a plugin allowing selection of a template.... I'm wondering if we could also have an option to select from available colorsets.....

HOWEVER, perhaps it is NOT a plugin at all??!!!

Let us use bulletproof as an example. BP has the following colorsets: blank, blue, default, green purple (plus anything else others have contributed).

We detect those in config.inc.php by any file ending in "_style.css". Not sure if that is relevant yet.

Anyway, an s9y site has been configured to use a default template for the site. The template/properties of categories plugin might also set a template for a specific category - not sure if that is relevant either, but thought I would mention it.

Should the template plugin be modified to include colorsets?

Could a site be called with some kind of parameter that loads a specific colorset, ie http://example.com/colorset=blue (or template=bulletproof?colorset=blue)

Thinking out loud here.... input? ideas?

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Shouldn't colorsets be offered as alternate stylesheets and selected from within the browser?

Colorsets and things like that are very template specific. Adding this to the plugin when it only works in bulletproof might be strange for users running different templates...

Regards,
Garvin

[Don Chambers]

I mentioned bp only as an example.... I suspect there will be other templates with colorset choices as time goes by.

Yes, the colorset is loaded via a stylesheet. I guess the question is how to do it. What I am looking for is an easy way to demonstrate multiple colorsets from a single installation... and the colorset selection would only apply to the visitor who has made that selection, not actually change the site's selected colorset.

So what would need to happen is all stylesheets normally loaded by index.tpl for that template would need to load except the configured colorset. Instead, colorset_style.css would need to load where the name "colorset" is provided in the actual url???

I dunno - just throwing out an idea right now. Maybe it could be a capability created in a template's config.inc.php file????

The only way I can achieve it at the moment is to make multiple copies of the same template, each with a different colorset configured... but that is a major PITA because there could be a lot of additional template options that need to be configured identically each time.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Yeah, alternate stylesheets can usually do that. You can even put javascript into the template itself to offer a colorset switcher (which in turn could be enabled through template options and not require a plugin at all)...

http://www.davenicolette.net/dhtml/switchstyles.html is an example, I think.

I think all of that should be solvable with some basic PHP code in config.inc.php to fetch a list of all colorsets (like already used for the configuration - only do that if the option is enabled to use the colorswitcher) and then pass on those colorsets to index.tpl to a alternate stylesheet head part.

HTH,
Garvin