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History: Theme Customizer

Preview of version: 2

New in Tiki18, the Style Guide Tool is an interactive page for editing site colors, fonts, and other style details, with the results shown in real time. The generated code can be input as custom CSS or Less variables on the Look and Feel admin page, to modify the appearance of the Tiki site. This tool is for making overall, global changes.


(Images will be added shortly.)

[image: condensed screenshot]

To access the tool, go to the Look and Feel admin page (tiki-admin.php?page=look), and the "Customization" tab. The Style Guide Tool activation checkbox is near the bottom of the page. This is an "advanced" feature, so be sure the feature preferences filter is set to "Advanced". You can make this your default in the dropdown list (under the filter icon).

[image: pref filter - advanced]

Then activate the feature by checking the checkbox and clicking the "Apply" button. When the page refreshes, hover over the Style Guide Tool "Actions" icon and, in the popup, click " View". This opens the style guide tool page.

[image: Style Guide Tool checkbox, etc.]

The tool works with the theme that is currently active at the site. Shown here are the Slate and TheNews themes.
[images: Slate and TheNews themes shown in style guide.]

There are sections of the tool for these page elements: page colors, fonts, headings, tables, buttons, forms, lists, navbar, dropdowns, tabs, alerts, and icons. At the page bottom there is a "Select a section" link for navigating to the sections in the page.

[image: page footer with selection icon]

Colors can be selected by clicking in the square sample area for each item, which causes a colorpicker to display. Or the CSS hex value can be edited directly.

[]image: colorpicker being used]

Changes such as font size and style affect the those properties on the HTML body tag, meaning that the changes will be implemented throughout the site unless they are overridden by a more-specfic CSS rule for a particular page element.

After making the desired edits, to save the results as CSS code, click the "Generate Custom CSS" button. To use the new custom CSS, copy it from the text area and paste it into the Custom CSS text area on the Look and Feel admin page. Generating custom CSS with this tool actually produces the CSS for all the items on the page, not just for the edited/changed items. To reduce the amount of redundant CSS rules, the custom CSS could be edited to retain just the changed rules, and the other, unchanged rules could be removed. [This should be improved in future development.]

The custom CSS will of course affect any theme that is in effect at the site, and could have unwanted effects if a theme is selected for use other than the theme whose rules were customized with the Style Guide tool. This is something to consider if more than one theme is used at the site, such as if users have permission to select a theme for their personal use.

Alternatively, the style changes can be saved as custom Less code.

Related links

https://doc.tiki.org/Tiki18#Style_Guide_tool
Demo: http://styleguide.tiki.suite.wiki/tiki-index.php

History

Advanced
Information Version
Marc Laporte 18
Marc Laporte 17
ibrahim mussa 16
ibrahim mussa update `style guide` image with `theme customizer` image, remove any information about less variable while in not available at the moment, and updare also `Custom css` with new one with does not containt the `Custom less` information. 15
benito.tshiteng 14
benito.tshiteng 13
Marc Laporte 12
Marc Laporte Page renamed from Style Guide to Theme Customizer. Semantic alias redirect created 11
Marc Laporte Style Guide Tool becomes Theme Customizer 10
Gary Cunningham-Lee Added another image. 9
Gary Cunningham-Lee Improved layout and text. 8
Gary Cunningham-Lee 7
Gary Cunningham-Lee Improved layout. 6
Gary Cunningham-Lee Fixed layout. 5
Gary Cunningham-Lee Images added. 4
Gary Cunningham-Lee Added page title and headings. 3
Gary Cunningham-Lee Initial content added; images ready but upload function isn't working at the moment. 2
Marc Laporte 1