WordPress MU

I wrote this plugin for my Wordpress MU site and am releasing it as GPL with the hope that some might find it useful. It allows your users to customise any theme on your site, changing images and colours in the CSS. It's still pretty raw but I do have plans to make it much prettier in the future.

Jason's Customciser

if someone customizes a theme, will it change ALL themes?

So lets say three people are using a theme called Iktib.
If one person customizes it, will all three have to live with it? Or does it customize the theme just for that person?

If so, how does it work? Does it backup the theme, and customize it for that person.

Also if so, will that added customized theme show up in the Presentation tab (theme selector)?

Sorry for the many questions, just wanted to get a better understanding before using it

Ditto.

I really cannot wait to take a look. This is exactly the idea i am currently working on. Nice to see somebody doing something in this area. I will let you know any feedback.

Q&A

Q: If someone customises a theme, will everyone else using the theme be affected?
A: No. Each user’s customisation will affect only his/her own theme. In future versions, we might allow users to ‘share’ their customisations.

Q: How does it work?
A: Briefly: When the plugin is run, it scans through the currently used theme and parses the CSS. It identifies images and colours and stores them as options that the user can change. It then injects these changes back into the theme.

I have this error:
URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration

How can I change the code to bypass the URL file-access restrictions ?

Thanks

aferraz: Updated it, should work now for disabled URL wrappers.

Nice work Jason! Joy for Singapore! :))
Will let you know if there are any bugs.

if it only applies to the person who customizes it, I guess it must duplicate the theme somewhere for that person and only display it for that person on the presentation tab?

the plugin stores the options for each user in the user's options table in the DB. When the pages are called up, the plugin injects these options as CSS into the head tags.

the themes are not duplicated, everything is kept as clean as possible :)

I installed. activated plugins. the new tab shows up under presentation, but there is nothing to customize. Is there something else I need to do?

jcow: have u tried changing to the default theme? what do you see in the admin tab- do the reset and update options buttons appear?

I haven't tried to change to the default theme, I will give that go in a bit and get back to you. I do see:

Images
[Hide]

Colours
[Hide]

Update Options

Reset Options

EDIT: It doesn't seem to matter if I use the default theme...

any errors/warnings/notices in your logs?

Not that i can tell...

jcow: sounds like something is preventing your server from retrieving pages via http from itself. it could be a spam plugin, a firewall, etc. if you didn't install anything like this, it would be your server provider you need to ask.

it might be something else but I would need to look at your site/server to diagnose it.

mrball: haven't tried it yet, but it sounds pretty slick. Kudos. :)

I got this error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STATIC, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or '}' in /home/name/public_html/wp-inst/wp-content/plugins/Jason_Customciser/Jason_Customciser.php on line 39

Needs PHP5 :)

Please keep us posted on any updates :)

I got it working in PHP4. I search/replaced the PHP5isms with PHP4 code, and changed a couple of things like adding get_header() to grab the style sheet loader code.
Looks good, and I'll throw it up somewhere later!

Here's a download link to my new version. This one works in PHP4 and uses get_header() as described above.
Anyone want to put a nice graphical front end on this so users can easily change their theme's colours?

http://inphotos.org/wordpress/Jason_Customciser-doc.zip

hi, this sounds promising.
Is the css parsed for sanity (as far as security is concerned ?).

donncha: thanks for doing the php4 port! don't know about calling get_header() directly though... assumes too much from theme writers?

quenting: it should be ;)

donncha - any chance you could just let me know what the get_header changes were? I'd like to use this with PHP5 but your get_header fix sounded important.

Cheers - Stuart.

amanzi - the simplest thing to do is just download the PHP4 compatible version and search through the code for get_header(), it's a straight replacement for the same line in the original file!

Quenting - you should test it yourself, I can't guarantee that someone can't import another style sheet by typing the right code into one of the textboxes.

mrball - all the themes I've seen load the style sheet from the header. Any that don't are hopefully obscure and not used much!

Cheers - I had a look at the original file but just wanted to check that it was just that one line that had been changed.

I have the same issue as jcow. Installed the php4 version, tab show up under themes, but nothing in there but:
Images
[Show]
[Hide]
Colours
[Show]
[Hide]

Whatever the template used.
Does it matter if you install in plugins and activate or just in mu-plugins ?

Did you install the HTML_CSS Pear package? If Pear is installed, then as root you can do "pear install HTML_CSS" I think. It wasn't installed on my box but use Google as there's plenty of documentation out there.

no, i thought there was a class specificly included to handle if it wasn't installed.
I'm not sure that's it though, because i installed another plugin (image manager) on my test env, and suddenly this one found some css to edit, but, it was the css of the plugin itself, rather than the css of the theme.
Curious things happening :)