Admin Color Schemes: Update color schemes to match Calypso

[ryelle]

See Automattic/wp-calypso#94471 — Many of the custom admin color schemes are slightly off in wp-admin, compared to the Calypso versions. This seems to be the case when a color scheme has a different color admin bar and admin menu (sidebar) - the core schemes are set up to use the same backgrounds and submenu colors. There are also some other minor issues with highlight colors.

Proposed changes:

• Introduces $masterbar-submenu-background and $masterbar-submenu-background-alt for the admin bar submenu colors, so that the admin menu can use different colors.
• Specific overrides for Bright and Powder Snow to ensure contrast when admin menu submenu text is dark, but admin bar text needs to be light. This CSS is pretty ridiculous, but it's all copied from the core _admin.scss for all assorted menu cases.
• Additional cleanup of colors and overrides to make sure the icons and text match when focused/hovered/etc.

Screenshots

The first two in each row are the current behavior, so you can see how the proposed change will apply the Calypso versions. The proposed change column also shows the admin bar and admin menu submenus.

Calypso	wp-admin	Proposed change

Other information:

• Have you written new tests for your changes, if applicable?
• Have you checked the E2E test CI results, and verified that your changes do not break them?
• Have you tested your changes on WordPress.com, if applicable (if so, you'll see a generated comment below with a script to run)?

Does this pull request change what data or activity we track or use?

No

Testing instructions:

1. Go to your user profile and select one of the custom color schemes
2. View a calypso page and a wp-admin bar (e.g., https://yoursite.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit.php and https://wordpress.com/posts/yoursite)
3. The admin menu colors should match
4. Icons should match the menu text, and generally not look "broken"

Note: I haven't been able to get the jetpack env set up locally, so I couldn't run any of the precommit checks — let me know if there's anything I'm missing here :) magically it worked today 🎉

[github-actions]

Thank you for your PR!

When contributing to Jetpack, we have a few suggestions that can help us test and review your patch:

• ✅ Include a description of your PR changes.
  
• 🔴 Add a "[Status]" label (In Progress, Needs Team Review, ...).
  
• ✅ Add a "[Type]" label (Bug, Enhancement, Janitorial, Task).
  
• ✅ Add testing instructions.
  
• ✅ Specify whether this PR includes any changes to data or privacy.
  
• ✅ Add changelog entries to affected projects
  

This comment will be updated as you work on your PR and make changes. If you think that some of those checks are not needed for your PR, please explain why you think so. Thanks for cooperation 🤖

---

The e2e test report can be found here. Please note that it can take a few minutes after the e2e tests checks are complete for the report to be available.

---

Follow this PR Review Process:

1. Ensure all required checks appearing at the bottom of this PR are passing.
2. Choose a review path based on your changes:
   • A. Team Review: add the "[Status] Needs Team Review" label
     • For most changes, including minor cross-team impacts.
     • Example: Updating a team-specific component or a small change to a shared library.
   • B. Crew Review: add the "[Status] Needs Review" label
     • For significant changes to core functionality.
     • Example: Major updates to a shared library or complex features.
   • C. Both: Start with Team, then request Crew
     • For complex changes or when you need extra confidence.
     • Example: Refactor affecting multiple systems.
3. Get at least one approval before merging.

Still unsure? Reach out in #jetpack-developers for guidance!

---

Mu Wpcom plugin:

• Next scheduled release: WordPress.com Simple releases happen semi-continuously (PCYsg-Jjm-p2).

If you have any questions about the release process, please ask in the #jetpack-releases channel on Slack.

---

Wpcomsh plugin:

• Next scheduled release: Atomic deploys happen twice daily on weekdays (p9o2xV-2EN-p2).

If you have any questions about the release process, please ask in the #jetpack-releases channel on Slack.

[github-actions]

Are you an Automattician? Please test your changes on all WordPress.com environments to help mitigate accidental explosions.

• To test on WoA, go to the Plugins menu on a WordPress.com Simple site. Click on the "Upload" button and follow the upgrade flow to be able to upload, install, and activate the Jetpack Beta plugin. Once the plugin is active, go to Jetpack > Jetpack Beta, select your plugin, and enable the try/sync-color-schemes branch.

  • For jetpack-mu-wpcom changes, also add define( 'JETPACK_MU_WPCOM_LOAD_VIA_BETA_PLUGIN', true ); to your wp-config.php file.

• To test on Simple, run the following command on your sandbox:

  bin/jetpack-downloader test jetpack try/sync-color-schemes
  

  bin/jetpack-downloader test jetpack-mu-wpcom-plugin try/sync-color-schemes
  

Interested in more tips and information?

• In your local development environment, use the jetpack rsync command to sync your changes to a WoA dev blog.
• Read more about our development workflow here: PCYsg-eg0-p2
• Figure out when your changes will be shipped to customers here: PCYsg-eg5-p2

[richtabor]

Any reason not to use core as the standard?

[ryelle]

The core themes still exist, these are extras.

Though I have learned since making this PR that there's a separate wpcom wp-admin view for when you've selected the "Classic" view, so I'll revise my screenshots for this view:

Before	After

[fushar]

We're going to remove Calypso version of the single-site view (nav unification) as part of the Untangling Calypso project in the future. Given that, is it that worth it to maintain this kind of override (for Classic Bright and Powder Snow)?

I'd imagine this could cause some confusion for future devs 🤔

For the record, I'm not sure for this set of colors, which comes first, Calypso's or wp-admin's. 😅

[ryelle]

IIRC these were designed for Calypso and ported back to wp-admin, which is probably why they don't slot in nicely with the color theming system. But I don't think that's a reason get rid of them - I'm always a fan of color schemes (I should update that plugin 😅).

The generated CSS assumes the admin bar and admin menu use the same background & text colors, and _overrides.scss handles setting the background color for the top bar ($masterbar-background), but does not change the text. So in Classic Bright & Powder Snow, when the admin menu dropdowns are updated to dark text on light background, this causes the admin bar dropdowns to be dark text on a (overridden) dark background.

So this override is necessary, somehow. It could be moved to _overrides.scss, but with only two affected I opted to not add even more variables + redundant CSS to all schemes.

Another option could be to update the style of the color schemes, so that the admin bar and admin menu dropdowns both use the same background & dropdown colors, then the colors should inherit correctly from the Sass variables. But that seemed like a design decision, and I was just aiming to replicate the calypso look.