History: Theme Customizer
Preview of version: 18 (current)
Theme customizer
In Tiki18, it was called "Style Guide Tool", but was renamed to "Theme customizer" in Tiki19 to be more descriptive. There were also some changes as:
- Tiki18 uses Bootstrap 3 with Less
- Tiki19 uses Bootstrap 4 with Sass
How to activate it
To access the tool, go to the Look and Feel admin page (tiki-admin.php?page=look), and the "Customization" tab. The activation checkbox is near the bottom of the page. If you don't see it, the reason is probably that Advanced features aren't being displayed, so follow the instructions in the box below.
Activate the feature by checking the checkbox and clicking the "Apply" button. When the page refreshes, hover over the Theme Customizer "Actions" icon and, in the popup, click " View". This opens the Theme Customizer page.
How to use it
The tool works with the theme that is currently active at the site. Shown here are the Slate and TheNews themes.
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.
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.
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.
How to use the results - as CSS
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 Theme Customizer 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 (if you are familiar enough with editing CSS). [This redundancy should be improved in future development.]
As Look and Feel custom CSS, these style rules 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.
(More information on using custom Less variables is coming soon.)