Fourteen Colours

Description

Not a big fan of green and black? Love the layout of Twenty Fourteen, but need its colors to match your brand? Don’t have time to create a child theme, or want to change up your site’s look on a regular basis without technical overhead?

Fourteen Colours is the most efficient way to re-colour the Twenty Fourteen theme. It provides two colour pickers, which together control:

  • Header/Sidebar/Footer Background Colour
  • Featured Content Background Colour
  • Link Colour
  • Search Bar Colour
  • Navigation Menu Hover Colours
  • Text Selection/Highlight Colour
  • Audio/Video Player Colourschemes
  • And more…

Fourteen Colours automatically adjusts your colour choices to ensure the minimum required contrast to keep Twenty Fourteen accessible-ready, and to keep your site as readable as possible. The plugin is designed to support almost any combination of colours, so you can be creative and express yourself with your site! Please report any issues on the support forums, after reading the FAQ and the changelog to see if they address your question.

The Accent Colour feature was originally developed in Twenty Fourteen core, but it was removed near the end of the initial development cycle due to a variety of concerns. This plugin addresses those concerns and adds the contrast colour feature to enable a broad range of custom colourschemes.

Special thanks to the entire Twenty Fourteen team for their work on the accent colour throughout the development cycle. This plugin (and Twenty Fourteen) would not exist without their hard work and attention to detail.

Screenshots

  • Light theme with a touch of blue
  • Autumn colors
  • Happy Holidays!
  • Purple and Pink
  • Blue and Orange
  • Grey and Yellow
  • Red and black

Installation

  1. Take the easy route and install through the WordPress plugin adder OR
  2. Download the .zip file and upload the unzipped folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
  3. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
  4. Go to the Customiser (Appearance -> Customise) and adjust the two new colour pickers under the “Colours” heading to your liking

FAQ

I tried using Fourteen Colours with a theme other than Twenty Fourteen and …

Don’t. There is a known bug where the plugin may be applied to other themes when live previewing them, but Fourteen Colors will prevent itself from functioning when the current theme is not Twenty Fourteen or a child.

Child Themes

Fourteen Colours is a plugin, not a child theme, because it is primarily programmatic (ie, it would only consist of a functions.php file), and for flexibility.

You can use Fourteen Colours with both Twenty Fourteen and child themes. Be aware that the Fourteen Colours settings are stored with the active theme, so if you switch to a child theme or switch child themes, you’ll need to re-set your colours. Child theme compatibility depends on the extent of changes made by the child theme. But child theme developers can hook into Fourteen Colours to extend it to adapt to their changes, allowing the plugin to work seamlessly even if the child theme is significantly different than the parent theme.

Suggested/Recommended Colours

The contrast colour option tends to work best with colors that are either greyscale or close to greyscale. Try light or dark greys in conjunction with any accent colour if the default black feels too bold.

Accent colours work best when they are intense, fully saturated colours that avoid anything too light or too dark. However, brighter colours such as yellow do work well, as do darker colours such as black, with a good choice of contrast color. If a particular set of colours feels close, but not quite right, try making the accent colour more intense and making the contrast colour lighter (if it’s already light) or darker (if it’s already dark) to increase the overall contrast of your site.

Known Issues

Due to the automatic generation of secondary colours, in order to maximize colour contrast ratios, undesirable colours may come up in some places. You can override these with custom CSS, and feel free to post in the support forums if you can’t figure it out (but search there first).

Please note that if you’re having trouble getting the plugin to “work” it is extremely likely that you’re doing something wrong. Don’t forget that the colour options are added to the Customiser.

Supported Colours

All colours are supported except for pure white (#fff), which should technically work but results in a poor user experience due to the lack of contrast, which helps to provide visual hierarchy. Pure black (#000) accent colours are more fully supported, but can also have (less significant) issues with providing proper visual hierarchy.

Block Editor Support

Fourteen Colours does its best to support custom styles in the block editor. While most customized styles will not show up in the editor, using the green and black colours from the color palettes when selecting block styles will allow content-colours to be customized by this plugin.

Reviews

August 30, 2018
Hi, unfortunately after you activate the plugin you can't change anymore the website title color... you must disable the plugin, change the title color and activate the plugin again.
August 5, 2018
Ran into this plugin after hours of setting up things with it and this was the final touch, I lucked out finding it, cheers!
September 19, 2017
im using "full width" so the "background" in this post will not show to me , i wan to change the white part to other color , can u do that ?
September 7, 2017
This plugin is easy to use and a must to customize colour codes for the twenty-fourteen template. Without that plugin I would have chosen another template or spent hours on css customization.
Read all 47 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Fourteen Colours” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“Fourteen Colours” has been translated into 5 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Fourteen Colours” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

Please note: this plugin is only updated when changes are needed for compatibility with theme updates or WordPress changes (or in rare cases, if additional bugs/edge cases are found and fixed). It is not anticipated that major updates will be needed in the future as of December 2015.

1.6

  • Apply custom colours to theme-registered block editor colour palettes.
  • Add support for block editor styles corresponding to WordPress 5.0.
  • Update colour patterns to address changes in Twenty Fourteen 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5.

1.5

  • Update colour patterns to address changes in Twenty Fourteen 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2. This includes full support for the media widgets introduced in WordPress 4.8 and 4.9.

1.4

  • Add postMessage previewing of base colors for an enhanced user experience. Contrast and accent colours are now instantly previewed in the customizer, with secondary generated colors updating on a slight delay (typically a few seconds).

1.3

  • Implement support for Selective Refresh in the Customizer. Colours will now be updated much more quickly (but still not instantly) in the Customizer preview. Available in WordPress 4.5+.

1.2

  • Updates for WordPress 4.0 / Twenty Fourteen 1.2. Please update those before updating Fourteen Colours.
  • The mediaelements-genericons component, which facilitated audio/video player colour-scheming, has been merged into Twenty Fourteen core.
  • Added two new filters to adjust the plugin’s output CSS: fourteen_colors_contrast_css and fourteen_colors_accent_css.
  • Leverage some of the Customizer API improvements in WordPress 4.0.
  • Fix a couple of really minor, obscure bugs that surfaced in the wild.

1.1

  • Full support for Twenty Fourteen 1.1.
  • Fix mobile menu-toggle button colours.
  • Fix support for button-styled links in widgets (via the .button class).
  • Add a filter to the version of the accent colour that contrasts with the white page background, facillitating the ability to override the automatically-generated version with another color picker via an add-on plugin.

1.0.2

  • Fix bugs with mobile navigation menus with certain colour combinations.
  • Add support for the .button class introduced in Twenty Fourteen 1.1 / WordPress 3.9.
  • Fix link and border colour in Twenty Fourteen Ephemera widgets when used in the Primary and Footer widget areas with a light contrast colour.
  • Override the Site Title option, as it is hidden from the Theme Customiser (since Fourteen Colours automatically adjusts it for contrast).
  • Add basic support for IE8, which is handled differently in Twenty Fourteen due to its lack of support for modern standards.

1.0.1

  • Add a description of the different colour controls (requires changes that might change the order of the options).
  • Fix paging navigation hover states (border, not background colour should change).
  • Darken all borders when using light contrast colours on mobile.
  • Fix sub-menu colours on mobile when using a light contrast colour.
  • Automatically refresh the cached plugin output CSS after the plugin has been updated.
  • Hide the site title colour control to reduce confusion, since the colour is automatically tweaked based on the contrast colour. The Header Text Colour option is still available via the Appearance -> Header page if it needs to be customized.

1.0

  • Plugin is ready for general use, alongside Twenty Fourteen 1.0 and WordPress 3.8.

0.7

  • Screenshots, finalized documentation.

0.6

  • Code cleanup, inline code documentation, coding standards to match Twenty Fourteen core.
  • Tweaks post-code-review, props @lancewillett.

0.5

  • Save the entire plugin CSS output as a single theme_mod to allow for more computationally intensive color calculations.
  • Introduce a more robust set of colour calculations; most importantly, the ability to calculate the contrast ratio between any two colours.
  • Adjustments to make any colour work as the accent colour, addressing the concerns that led to the feature’s removal from Twenty Fourteen core.
  • Ensure that there is adequate contrast between all colors that are displayed against each other.

0.2

  • Build out of the contrast color option.

0.1

  • Initial port from the Twenty Fourteen Theme’s implementation.
  • Initial pass at an experimental “Contrast Colour” option.