You may have noticed that I’ve added my eighth plugin to WordPress.org: Fourteen Colors. It adds color customization to the new Twenty Fourteen default WordPress theme, half of which was developed in the core theme before being removed yesterday, just over a week before the theme’s release (broader explanation coming soon).

In the next week, I’ll build out Fourteen Colors, creating what I hope is my most polished plugin yet, inside and out. I already know that I’ll be further utilizing the function that generates color variants, which I wrote when the feature was developed for the core theme, to ensure the highest color contrast possible given various contexts within the theme.

I also created a plugin to customize the (much bolder and more varied) colors of the Twenty Thirteen theme, entitled Thirteen Colors (that plugin is much less elegant than I hope Fourteen Colors will be). I’m starting to wonder why WordPress’ default themes don’t place an emphasis on built-in visual customization. Twenty Eleven was the last to have comprehensive color customization options, or even a link color option, for that matter.

The reasons that the custom accent color was removed from Twenty Fourteen seem referable to the broader lack of customization available in default themes. Hopefully, Fourteen Colors can successfully provide an answer to the concerns over giving users the power to make “bad” color choices, at least in terms of readability if not in terms of beauty. As for code complexity, maybe it’s time to consider customization as a component worthy of adding some weight, like featured content is in Twenty Fourteen. At the end of the day, these themes are the first thing users encounter when getting started with WordPress, and it seems wrong not to showcase the power and flexibility of the platform in the first-run experience (the ability to easily browse for new themes is also critical here).

Maybe Twenty Fifteen will bring the power of native visual customization back to the end user. After all, we have a wonderful Theme Customizer that works excellently for visual customizations. I’d love not to create a “Fifteen Colors” plugin next year.