The new native themes are really a big step forward! Congrats! It’s also good that existing customizations are being smoothly adopted into the new themes framework. Or maybe not so smoothly? At least from an admin-user perspective I’m having some difficulties getting my head around the new way of native themes. I suppose I’m not the only one so I’d like to do some thinking out loud here to try and come to grips with it all. Please confirm or correct as appropriate:
- I guess the first thing to understand is that your “main” page for customization is no longer the CSS/HTML tab (now called “Themes”) but one step further down: the “Default” sub-tab. This is where I get an overview of my default theme’s settings, including the colour scheme. (It’s a bit confusing at first, because it is no longer evident which colour scheme is being used by looking at the Color tab.) Wouldn’t it make sense to display the default theme sub-tab by default when navigating to the themes tab?
- Each of my previous customization elements (such as: “Avatar shadow” or “Add Link to hamburger menu”) has now become a theme in it’s own right. I understand that this is a technical necessity for transitioning but not really the way you would build a native theme from scratch, right? Or maybe it is, because it allows me to easily turn them on and off like previously (and to re-use them in various themes)? But if that is the idea, I don’t like that fully fledged themes and theme-elements are presented in one list of “themes”, as if they are the same (of course, you can argue that technically they are the same, it’s all a matter of perspective, but for the admin user who’d never treat the design element “Avatar shadow” as a theme in it’s own right, it is not the ideal way of presenting things. I wonder if I’m asking for too much when I suggest to keep themes and theme elements seperate, i.e. in a seperate Theme Elements tab?
- When you first look at the new Themes tab, it looks as if all your previous customization elements have been deactivated (because the don’t have an asterisk any more), but that is not the case. Which ones are used can now be seen on the Default-theme sub-tab. But I have some gripes with that: In particular, there is no more easy way of seeing which theme-elements are currently not used in any theme (and might therefore be deleted). So, I’d like to suggest to bring back the asterisk (or some other visual marker) for theme elements that are in use in another theme, similar to the user icon that appears if users can select a theme(-element). That way, it’d be much easier to read the themes list (and perhaps this would also make my above suggestion about a separate theme-element tab superfluous).