Twenty Fourteen: Remove Header Text Color Customization Option

[celloexpressions]

See #25094 and #25220. The ability to customize the header text color is pretty much useless and can be confusing (referable to the site title, but sounds referable to the nav also). In the name of decisions, not options, we need to remove it (the other two color controls are very useful now, particularly the accent color).

We do need to retain the ability to hide the site title; retaining that but hiding the color customization doesn't seem to be possible with the core custom header feature at the moment. If that is in fact the case, we need to make that possible in core, because themes should have control over how many options they expose to the end user.

[lancewillett]

I disagree with this one. I think the ability to tweak the title color should be left alone, and is separate from the accent color.

Suggesting wontfix.

[celloexpressions]

One of the biggest problems is that the label is not "site title" color, but header text color. If we keep it, it should also change the color of the header nav, which matches the title, as this is something that users would expect to be able to customize. Without being familiar with the typical way this control works in other themes, and other than the fact that users can see what's changing in the customizer, I don't think new users would expect the current behavior.

In terms of design, I don't think having a different color for the site title will help anyone; in fact, I would imagine it will generally make the site look worse. We probably don't want to make it this easy for users to make their site look worse (especially after seeing some of the CSS customizations that have been done to Further). Since it's on a black background, using any color other than the default white will result in less contrast, which is probably not the desired effect for the site title. Users would still be able to hide the site title under this proposal, which should cover the majority of use cases.

The option is really not very useful, and is just one more unnecessary option for the user to look at (decisions, not options...), see prior discussion on #25094. So I think we should remove it if possible, I'll look into possible implementations in core this weekend.

[celloexpressions]

To clarify, this isn't really related to the accent color in any way (other than being another visually competing input/option), but it kind of got grouped into that ticket when it branched off of #25094.

[lancewillett]

I think you're reading too much into trying to avoid users shooting themselves in the foot. :)

But, the main reason for this in other themes is to provide contrast over top of backgrounds and header images. So, you are correct to argue that in Twenty Fourteen that isn't a needed use case.

I'd be very interested in the core implications you mentioned, though.

[celloexpressions]

After digging around in core, it looks like adding support for not showing the color option is tricky. The whole custom header/custom background implementation is... messy. (For the record, I was thinking we could add the ability to disable the text color by setting the default to 'none', or something along those lines. But then we'd also need to deal with back-compatibility in the theme, and the alternate solution is much more elegant.)

However, given the UI mess surrounding the custom header page, I don't think there's much benefit to worrying about hiding the color option there. Hopefully we can ditch that whole screen soon anyway (#25571).

Where it really matters, especially if the separate page is eventually gone, it the customizer. And that's where having an almost useless option next to (and before) two really powerful options is particularly offensive.

I think our best option is actually to just remove the control from the customizer. Since we're already modifying other existing controls, this is actually completely acceptable as the recommended/default-theme way to hide unneeded controls from the customizer. After all, this is kind of the point of having the remove_control function. (As an aside, this would also further showcase the customizer in Twenty Fourteen since we'd demonstrate adding controls, removing them, and modifying existing ones.)

I'm adding a patch that removes the control from the customizer. I honestly don't care about the Custom Header page, and don't think many users spend much time there, especially if they didn't use WordPress much before 3.4 (ie, newer users are increasingly more likely to use the customizer as much as possible as it becomes more prominent).

If we do decide to keep this control around, we should at least add postMessage support to it, like the background color has (though this isn't as realistic for the accent color, unfortunately).

[celloexpressions]

Remove the header text color control from the customizer, update function docs.

[obenland]

Please let's just remove the header text options entirely.
The title does not need to be removed or have its color changed, because we don't use the header image as a background to it.

[celloexpressions]

Replying to obenland:

Please let's just remove the header text options entirely.
The title does not need to be removed or have its color changed, because we don't use the header image as a background to it.

My strong preference as well (and it's nice to see all of that red). Skimming back through the discussions on trac and IRC, the decision to retain custom header support was primarily because of usage with Further on .com. For the header text controls, lancewillett (and others) wanted to retain the ability to hide it for the use-case where the site title is in the header, although I don't see duplication there as much of an issue. We didn't get stats for hiding the text, but it was definitely only a small fraction of the 47% using a header, from the sites I looked at. Most of those had a lot of custom css anyway, so they could've hidden the text that way.

[lancewillett]

In 25765:

Twenty Fourteen: remove header text customization options, fixes #25540. Props celloexpressions, obenland.

[lancewillett]

In 26573:

Twenty Fourteen: re-add the Header Text Customization Option. Props iamtakashi, fixes #26338; see #25540.