New 'recent', 'suggested', and 'sampled' styles feature – feedback wanted!

I stopped using Microthemer because A) it was too hard to find the right selector. And B) I didn’t want to add yet another style sheet. And finally, C) I thought the pace of development was slow.

To be honest, I am using Yellow Pencil now and loving it.

Something I did like with Microthemer was the ability to add a snippet to the theme’s functions.php so that I could deactivate Microthemer, and still have the generated CSS be active.

But when I thought about it, I wondered why Microthemer just didn’t add the code to the child theme’s custom.css sheet, and not require more PHP code to be added.

@QloudPress,

I checked YellowPencil and there are some nice features there that could be incorporated into Microthemer as well to make it even better, namely (ordered by importance):

• The overall speed and responsiveness. YP is indeed impressively fast and MT could improve in this direction as well
• I liked very much the selector search feature – allows to quickly locate CSS selectors and select them
• The Wireframe mode is also a nice touch – allow me to focus on styling the layout only. Not a critical feature but something that impresses
• The Filter property – I didn’t see this in the MT’s roadmap so it would be nice to have there as well

Other than the above, I don’t think that YP is so much better than MT. There are a lot of things that MT has that YP does not (not going into detail cause it’s irrelevant here).

I also do not agree re the development pace. Sebastian is very responsive and does introduce new features quite often. He also listens to his customers, in contrast to some other WP developers out there (check Elementor’s github page). In contrast, the YP’s “External CSS” feature has been in Beta for more than 11 months. How’s that for speed? 😉 And it also writes the CSS in the plugin’s directory – ugh!

I’ll continue my support for MT as well – I believe it will get better and better.

Sorry to hear you were unwell Sebastian. I hope you have made a full recovery. And yes I am building a new site right now and will definitely try it again. Thank you, and the other respondants for dealing with my objections so positively, and leaving the way open to move forward.

@Sebastian,

1. Do you see yourself using recent or suggested styles frequently, or will you prefer to continue entering the values with the keyboard?

RE. Time will tell but I think recent is useful. And suggested too (if there is any kind of coherence on the suggestions intelligence behind it)

2. Is is too much to have a sampled styles features in the dropdown menus?

RE: I didn’t get the sampled… What is this? Does it pick already in use sizes from the site?

3. Does the browser hang when you click the sampled styles icon? If so, please send me a link to your site so I can see how many stylesheets your theme loads. And maybe add libraries e.g. genericons.css to an ignore list.

RE: Didn’t notice any issues yet.

4. Should suggested styles appear in the recent menu list too after being used? Or does this lead to unnecessary duplication of values in the menu? An alternative could be that styles only appear in the recent list if they are not the same as a suggested value.

RE: I think recent should show all recent styles used, even if those are duplicate from suggestions (kind of mental organization – that way I can see what I tried before)

5. Should the recent/suggested/sampled lists have a clear icon?

RE: I don’t see that being extremely necessary but… sometimes it could be useful if we want just to reset all things 🙂

6. Is it too advanced to suggest rem based values over pixel values?

RE: Couldn’t that be defined on settings? I don’t see a problem with that though.

I didn’t miss completely 🙂 What I mean was I was not understanding what sampled means. But the video will help on that.

Thanks

Hi there,
I do like the suggested and sampled style features. And thank-you for a vey clear and concise explanation of the rem font sizing – finally I can understand how it works so with the suggested and sampled features I can easily use it now.
The recent feature would be good while getting used to using the new features, however I agree with you that after a while they may become a nuisance. Maybe a feature that can be turned on or off in preferences?
Overall I enjoy using Microthemer – a really helpful and effective plug-in.
Ann-Marie

Dear Sebastian,

I had played some time with these new additions and here are my comments 🙂

1. Do you see yourself using recent or suggested styles frequently, or will you prefer to continue entering the values with the keyboard?
In terms of increasing my productivity I don’t see a great value in the recent/suggested styles. After some time I find myself directly inputting the values by hand instead of looking for them in the suggestions. The fact is that the suggestions are more of a distraction for me – the time I spent to browse for a possible value to use could simply be used to enter the value by hand.

2. Is is too much to have a sampled styles features in the dropdown menus?
I think so, yes. Honestly, the fact that I have a “width” value somewhere in my page does not help me at all during the time I decide on the width of the selector that I am currently working with.

3. Does the browser hang when you click the sampled styles icon? If so, please send me a link to your site so I can see how many stylesheets your theme loads. And maybe add libraries e.g. genericons.css to an ignore list.
No, it does not, but then again – I do not use that feature 🙂

4. Should suggested styles appear in the recent menu list too after being used? Or does this lead to unnecessary duplication of values in the menu? An alternative could be that styles only appear in the recent list if they are not the same as a suggested value.
To be honest, I would definitely prefer to have some other features added that would definitely help my productivity instead – for example, the MT selector search and the CSS selector search (these are 2 separate things 🙂 ) or the highlighting of the current selector in the directory tree. I am quite desperate for these – find myself missing them every time I start working with MT.

5. Should the recent/suggested/sampled lists have a clear icon?
See 4 above 🙂

6. Is it too advanced to suggest rem based values over pixel values?
No, it’s fine.

All the best!