Three developers you can name, one plugin done properly

It started with a dark mode that kept breaking things

ThemeAtelier began in 2016 the way many WordPress companies do: one developer, a long list of client sites, and the same small problems turning up on every one of them. Rather than solve those problems again for each client, we started turning the fixes into plugins and publishing them for free on WordPress.org.

Dark mode was one of those problems. The options available mostly inverted a site’s colours and called it done. Invert a page and your brand red becomes a sickly cyan, product photos go strange, logos disappear, and a carefully designed pricing table stops making sense. Visitors switch that kind of dark mode on once, wince, and switch it off.

So we set out to build one that reads the colours a site already renders, generates a dark palette from them with contrast preserved, and gives the site owner precise control over the handful of things that always need special treatment. That turned out to be a far bigger piece of engineering than “invert everything” — which is roughly why, several years later, we are still refining it.

In 2026, we rebuilt Darkify’s entire admin panel from scratch in React, with a live preview of your real site beside every setting. It is the biggest change the plugin has had, and it came almost entirely from what users told us was hard about the old one.