Standard Color Swatches

I have to ask: color swatches for what? Posts?

Edit: Sorry, I’m distracted today. ?? To elaborate, do you mean for selecting colors when you use the Visual Editor to draft a post?

yep standard colors you add in general settings of WordPress. Frankly I can’t be arsed with adding them every time i use the WYSIWYG.

So for a post you may add a color for a wrapper or heading color text but every time the WYSIWYG is opened up the specific colors you need are gone and you have to add the hex color every time you need it.

Sounds daft to me, why no facility to pick standard colors you need for the website setup and further development. It might not seem much but if you need to keep going back to an excel sheet or word doc to pick up the hex color 100’s of times it mounts up to a lot of time.

Hope that explains it. I’m all for time savers large or small but lots of volume.

Oh I see. Sometimes themes are set up where you don’t need to do this colouring in the WYSIWYG editor. When you hit publish, the theme automatically styles headings to a certain colour. If you’re getting to the stage where it becomes tedious to set the colour through the editor, maybe it’s time to style things with CSS.

Just curious, is this because you have to constantly add color to “Contineco”?

Nope not for any website in particular.

I think you’re not necessarily thinking about this from an efficiency point of view or from client side either.

Of course themes have colors setup for headings, body text etc etc but the way pages and posts are created these days with more complexity you often need to change font colors, wrappers, background of columns and so on for each page or post. The list goes on.

Adding color swatches every time you need them in every WYSIWYG for different pages and posts is a daft process. Why go back and forth to other documents where you save the 10 corporate or business colors? So unnecessary!

The process should be very simple and done in one of 2 ways. Add the 10 colors under general settings in WordPress and up they pop as options in the WYSIWYG, highlight text or select wrapper, whatever you need and click on the color. Simples! Alternatively go to a WYSIWYG on any page or post add the color to the swatches and it appears in every WYSIWYG for all posts and pages. Now, you add the color in a WYSIWYG and go to another one and the color is not there so you have to add it again and again and again.

I prefer the general settings option, add your 10 hex colors and use them wherever you like in WordPress. Backgrounds, fonts etc etc.

WordPress isn’t a dull blogging platform anymore it’s more than that, not only does the developer need access to colors but so does the client. It’s not just about adding css to a child theme,I do that anyway this is a simple select and click solution to get the job done fast. Adding css for each post is a little excessive for my liking and not a healthy client solution either.

The process is daft at the moment, it really is and I don’t see this as a heavyweight option to add. I mean every business, website or blog has their own colors so surely this makes sense.

What you’re suggesting here would probably be better done as a plugin.

It is relatively uncommon for users to change the color of text and other elements inside posts and pages, at least, within the post editor itself. Design of the page tends to be fixed across multiple pages so that the colors are consistent as an overall whole. Usually, colors controlled by the theme or customized in the customizer are applied to the page.

Reading things with changing text colors or even changing fonts is a bit weird. Normally you’d want, say, all the headers to be all the same color, and the same font. You wouldn’t specify that on a per-post level. It would be universal across the whole site, and specified in the theme, not in the post editor.

So, while nothing prevents you from changing the color in the post itself, it’s not very commonplace, and specialized enough that a plugin would be the right place for such functionality.

I do wonder what websites you are creating Sam? Many sites have numerous colors on a page these days perhaps using 5-10 corporate colors. Take one page websites as an example using rows with white wrappers, some with black, others with blue, whatever the design, fonts, backgrounds and so on will change to fit with each row. I’m afraid this is not weird but par for the course these days!

Take it a step further and you have websites with multiple pages and multiple layouts using you guessed it, the same colors in different combinations.

If all you do is blog, then fine the colors from the theme and css will suffice but many folks are using WordPress to build complex pages that combine colors.

Sorry but another plugin to the collection for this task is daft. Process, process, process for me, not more wasted time. This functionality should be in the core. I’d be fuming if I was a client having to keep going back to excel sheets or word to get the hex code. #annoying.

Plugin is not the answer, WordPress needs to respond in some ways to the likes of wix and other junk out there to ensure it is still easy for non developers.

I do wonder what websites you are creating Sam? Many sites have numerous colors on a page these days perhaps using 5-10 corporate colors. Take one page websites as an example using rows with white wrappers, some with black, others with blue, whatever the design, fonts, backgrounds and so on will change to fit with each row. I’m afraid this is not weird but par for the course these days!

Do you see a whole lot of color changing on, say, https://news.blogs.cnn.com/ (which runs WordPress, BTW)? The titles of the articles are all sort of darkish blue, the text is black, links are a slightly different shade of blue, etc.

The colors you’re describing are on the page, certainly, but they are elements of the page’s design, not part of the text and not something that one would input via the post-editor. You are not using the Pages screen to create the design of the page, you’re using it to input the textual content of the page. The design is part of the theme, the widgets, the Customizer screen. The design is fixed, the content changes.

If all you do is blog, then fine the colors from the theme and css will suffice but many folks are using WordPress to build complex pages that combine colors.

Then they should use a plugin or some other software to do that instead. WordPress is a content management system, not a webpage designing system. You can build websites in WordPress. You can rearrange elements on them, you can edit their content, you can even select things like colors if themes support that sort of levels of customization. But it’s not Frontpage, or Word, or Excel, or even Photoshop. Different tools for different purposes.

Core may indeed add an improved color picker to the TinyMCE editor at some point, but it won’t be a prominent change because changing colors in post text is a very limited use case for what WordPress does. WordPress is a primarily a publishing tool.

https://news.blogs.cnn.com/ of course not, like I said blogs will be consistent but we don’t just use wordpress for blogs these days now do we? Come on, please!

Where next? Yes you do design the pages in the post editor, here are 4 such examples I could create in wordpress using the post editor for everything in in between the navigation and footer.

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/home
https://www.freshbooks.com/features/online-invoicing
https://www.u2.com/index/home
https://evernote.com/

All of the above have variations in font color, backgrounds and so on. What more can I say?

I know plugins are available to extend the use of WordPress but I can’t keep adding plugins, it bloats the solution and may cause more conflicts.

Basic lightweight additions to the core of WordPress like this should be considered. The plugins you may add to enhance complexity don’t necessarily mess about with the WYSIWYG, they use it in its basic form.

I’m not sure you’re fully appreciating the strategic direction of how WordPress is being used by folk. I know I’m not the only one to have these frustrations.

All I’m asking for is a simple solution to a time consuming nuisance.

As my personal point of view, every page that you’ve linked to there would never be a “page” in any of my sites. Each one like that wold use a template that draws in the information for each section from it’s own area, and dipslays it in it’s own area which can be styled by the CSS rules for that area. Trying to design a full page like that in any page designer out there would be madness. Yes you could create them in the page editor, but should you? Would a normal client be able to handle the HTML coding for all of those areas? Personally, I say no (from lots of experience…).

I do understand what you’re saying and being able to save custom colours woudl be usful in some fringe use-cases, but speaking as someone that has to constantly undo, re-do and re-work the mess that clients make trying to build just a plain-text page, something like the links that you’ve given above is out of the relm of what a standard user is capable of doing, and really should be left in plugin territory.

I might need 10 templates with css for each page I need if I did it that way. I’m not doing that, those sites I listed would probably have multiple page variants leaving the template and css idea as unwieldy.

Without seeing it and then tweaking it as you go, you can’t get the to the right solution so creating those pages above using the post editor is fine. Some of us like to see what is being structured as we proceed and helps us to be creative rather than robotic and code driven

A client can handle it no problem, it depends how you have built the page and whether you trained them a little. All clients need a little help using their site. I think it depends on whether you are building sites for clients to use or you’re building sites to milk them dry?

I do find myself getting a little irritated by responses that convey these cases as fringe or rare cases. Under no circumstances are they anymore. Those statements make no sense at all. Complex pages are here to stay and they are most certainly not being built using templates and css in many instances. They can be carefully constructed in the post editor and it really is not madness but a way to expand creativity!

I don’t need to be reminded that WordPress is not word or indeed indesign but such basic functionality fails me. Core can’t keep saying plugin, plugin, plugin they need more appreciation for how WordPress is being used.

This is lightweight anyway (no I don’t want another plugin because no doubt it will conflict with something). As for whoever made the decision to remove the color picker entirely in versions not long ago, what was going through their head?? My word!

There is no logic to my solution not being in place, none at all!

What is the reason why you want it in core? You know this will affect all of us.

I might need 10 templates with css for each page I need if I did it that way.

Yes, you would. Because that would be the right way to do it.

You certainly would not create all that HTML and then paste it into the TinyMCE editor. Because that would be somewhat crazy.

All those pages you’re pointing to would be hardcoded as part of the theme, not made by hand in a textbox. If you wanted to change them, you would edit the theme.

Good grief because the post editor is worse than the first ever word processor and it’s 2015 that’s why I want it in core.I’m not saying replicate TinyMCE advanced and therefore the world of options but this is just a basic good addition that’s no dramas to add.

If WordPress was built for only coders then no problem leave it out but it is not.

Sam, yes you can build it that way and it is not crazy! Why would you create such a complex theme, every page on a 80 page site could be structured differently. OUCH! 80 templates, blimey. What you’re saying is that a modern website should not be created using the page function of WordPress, as such why use WordPress at all?

Sorry but no logic is being presented to me here.

jimf81: The post editor is not supposed to be as good as a word processor. This is because it is meant to edit posts, not entire web pages. It’s a space to edit one small part of a larger whole. If you’re using it to make the entire page, then of course it’s not going to be very good.

And no real site has 80 odd pages all structured differently. Most modern sites have only a few different designs, shared amongst many pages. The content changes, the structure and most of the CSS remains constant. That is the modern way that web pages are built.

If you’re literally making a completely new design for every single page on the site, then WordPress is absolutely the wrong tool for you. It’s not designed to do that, in any way. It’s designed to help people without that sort of knowledge to build websites and publish their content online. It’s a content-management-system, not a webpage design system.

What you’re describing is Microsoft FrontPage, not WordPress. If you need to design whole new pages every time you publish anything, no CMS will do that for you. That’s not the point or goal of a modern CMS.