Kind of random PHP question
 

I'm thinking about ways to modify Atahualpa to use with clients who want to be able to customize their site but in the lowest-effort way possible. I've already played with removing a bunch of the setting tabs/ options so as to only allow them to modify the things I know they'll want to mess with. Now I'm wondering what it would take to have a couple single entries for the site color scheme that would auto-populate the individual color settings.

So for example, if they are using three colors (let's say red, blue, green), they would need to select a primary color, a secondary color and an accent color. The primary color would be all headers, the secondary would be all links plus the sidebar border and the accent would be the link hover color and the sidebar backgrounds. (These are random, made up examples - that would probably be ugly). What would it take, generally speaking (but more specifically than "PHP") to make that happen on the admin side?

This is still pretty theoretical, I'm just curious. My PHP isn't amazing, but I can usually pick out solutions to specific problems in it.

Related: Might someone be willing to give me a hint as to how I could move many of the color settings to one tab and have them all use the color picker/ show the color like the link color fields do? I'm not asking you to do it for me, just give me a nudge in the right direction :)

Thanks & looking forward to learning/ theorizing/ discussing ;)

Remember that every element on the page can be colored and only some are setup with options. That said, there are well over 100 locations in the theme options that you can change the color.

Thanks for responding to my harebrained ideas :)

The over 100 places thing is what I'm trying to figure out how to CHANGE. I want there to only be the option to set a couple of colors, which then determine the color for multiple elements. Making it LESS customizable, since most of the people I work with aren't looking for that degree of customization but do want to be able to change some colors on their own. I'm thinking the answer is that I need to learn more about the admin interface in general such that I can just make the color options fields I want to keep "talk" to the right elements.

Also, I don't know if y'all are interested, but I totally rearranged the tabs on the Theme Options page and I think it's more intuitive/ clear the way I've got it. I'm happy to share :)

1) you will be actually forking the theme so you should rename it leaving in the credit to the existing theme (go read the GPL license)
2) you will have to recode any changes each time the theme upgrades

css.php is what creates the style that gets included, but it grabs the various includes from the options array, so you will have to go thru all the css.php code to see where each option comes from and then locate that array entry in the rest of the code and then code the changes to pick the color from what ever you add as a color picker.

Plus you will have to remove the code that allows the user to change the color now.

In my mind, this is not a simple project...but have fun.

Oh yes, I am not expecting it to be simple at all. That's why it's mostly theoretical at this point. I think it would just be really useful to have a theme that has Atahualpa's flexibility but also has a less intimidating entry level for customization for people who just don't need all the options. And, I am willing, as I have time, to play around with it. The thing about updates is what I am least enthused about with this.

I mean, I don't find the current theme options intimidating, but the people I work with definitely would.

Thanks for the links and the direction about which files to start with as I play, super helpful!

I would be interested to see how you have rearranged the tabs.

Here's a screen capture of the tabs (it's a local test installation):
http://www.aquickstudyonline.com/wp-...en-capture.png

Note that the very first tab is the "START" tab. Also, I took away the SEO, RSS and Favicon tabs entirely because in the use case I'm exploring I would have people use plugins for those functions.