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New Feature: Personal Configuration (sans serif fonts/night mode beta)

Ben Halpern on March 15, 2019

Update: Night mode is coming along nicely and looks awesome! It was not as far along when I first wrote this. We just shipped a new feature: Displ...

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Ben Halpern • Mar 15 '19

@link2twenty if you want to make a PR to provide a better path towards our ideal state with themes, go for it. Or we can chat more in the issue. We may want to tweak this approach a bit but I wanted to get something out there as a tangible proof of concept and some momentum in this direction.

Andrew Bone • Mar 18 '19

I'm about to be busy for a while, starting a new job (very exciting), but I think more discussion is needed. I don't know much about the backend so would need to hear from some people with some ideas on how to do it there. @rhymes maybe?

As for the front end simply having a style block at the top of the body with the correct style information would be enough.

<style>
    :root {
        --theme-background: #243447;
        --theme-color: #fff;
        --theme-top-bar-background: #141d26;
        --theme-top-bar-color: #fff;
        --theme-top-bar-search-background: #424a54;
        --theme-top-bar-search-color: #fff;
        --theme-top-bar-write-background: #c51f5d;
        --theme-top-bar-write-color: #fff;
        --theme-container-background: #324761;
        --theme-container-color: #fff;
        --theme-container-box-shadow: none;
        --theme-container-border: 1px solid #141d26;
    }
</style>

Provided that doesn't run into the caching issue.

Ben Halpern • Mar 18 '19

Putting that directly into the HTML wouldn't work per se, but along the lines of my initial implementation, this should work if done along the lines of how this has been implemented.

How this currently works:

User has stored config as attributes on the model's table
Config is served async and stored in localstorage, same as how we do other stuff like user profile
Inline script modifies html (render-blocking, but no network latency because inline).

Currently I quick-and-dirty did it via the body class. I should have waited but I was pretty excited to get something out and I was slightly confused about this part but have more clarity now. I'll modify this to use :root and explain how it's done.

I'll make a detailed DEV post once this is in place.

Ben Halpern • Mar 18 '19

And congrats on the new job Andrew!

Andrew Bone • Mar 18 '19

Another question we need to ask is will users be able to set all the variables themselves or just have a few premade themes to choose from?

There are bits that won't look quite right with this implementation but if people raise issues saying, 'this bit looks off', it will be easy enough to track down the style and sort it.

Thank you, it's my first 'real' development job, better late than never 😀

Ben Halpern • Mar 18 '19

I think we can build towards letting folks set their own variables, but let's start by collectively working towards a shared concept of night mode and open things up once we've crossed that bridge.