Coloured Backgrounds in Gutenberg

To add a splash of colour behind a paragraph of text, you go over to the sidebar and you will see two tabs. One says Colour Settings and the other says Advanced

When you open the Colour Settings you see two palettes of colours. Depending on which palette you choose, you can change the colour of the text and/or the colour of the background to the text.

You can choose one of the predefined colours that are there or you can click on the multi-coloured circle at the end of the swatch of colours and make any colour you want.

Here is a short paragraph with the background colour a nice rose pink using the hexadecimal #ffdfe0

When you add a quote, however, the Colour Settings tab disappears leaving only the Advanced tab.

Open the Advanced tab and you will see that it says Additional CSS Class.

I wondered what it meant until I realised it was an invitation to create a CSS class.

The little that I know about classes is that you should name them something that is not likely to have been used elsewhere in the main code. So I named it ‘quote-thing’. Catchy, eh?

Stage 2 was to add the CSS to the CSS section in the Customiser. It has to refer to the class and it has to tell the class what to do. So I said it should make the background a specific colour #ebf2f5 – a pale blueish colour.

And I wanted to put a bit of padding around the quote so that it didn’t look like it was sitting in a straightjacket.

Here is the code:

/* background colour for quote */
.quote-thing {
background: #ebf2f5;
padding-top: 15px;
padding-right: 15px;
padding-bottom: 5px;
padding-left: 15px;
}

And here are two quotes attributed to Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise.

The second Dostoyevsky quote is interesting and has been used in many a book and film as well as it appearing in real life. It also goes to show that there is nothing new under the sun. The Buddha said:

‘It is better to live one day seeing the rise and fall of things, than to live a hundred years without ever seeing the rise and fall of things.’

Notice that I didn’t add the CSS class to this quote, so it does not have a coloured background. If I gave it another CSS class name and a different hexadecimal then it could have a different colour background to the Dostoyevsky quote.