Update themes and plugins to support automatic dark mode

Previously, all colors in Discourse were stored as SCSS variables. To support automatic dark mode color scheme switching, we have converted these colors in core to custom CSS properties. You can easily see the full list in the inspector now:

Themes and plugins need to switch all the $color SCSS variables used in stylesheets to the --color CSS property equivalents. In most cases, this is a simple find and replace task:

-   background-color: $primary-very-low;
+   background-color: var(--primary-very-low);

But there are some cases where a theme or a plugin is using a more complex variation of a color, for example, when darkening or lightening using SCSS color functions. These cases require a more complex refactoring, and for this we have added the capacity to extend color definitions in themes and plugins.

In plugins

This commit in the discourse-encrypt plugin is a good and simple example of such a refactor. It moves a mix($color1, $color2) SCSS declaration into a separate file and stores it as a CSS custom property. Then the new file is registered as a :color_definitions asset which ensures that the newly declared color property is included in the color definitions stylesheet.

In themes

In themes, you can do the same thing by declaring CSS custom properties in the common/color_definitions.scss stylesheet. You can look at this commit in the graceful theme for an example.

Some additional notes

• when using transparent colors via the rgba($color, 0.5) function, SCSS accepts HEX and RGB colors in the first parameter, whereas CSS custom properties only accept an RGB color. That is why we have introduced the hexToRGB() helper and some properties with the --rgb suffix in the color definitions. An example:

// color_definitions.scss
:root {
  --primary: #{$primary};
  --primary-rgb: #{hexToRGB($primary)};
}

// other stylesheet
.element {
  background-color: rgba(var(--primary-rgb), 0.05);
}

• note that in the snippet above, the SCSS variable is interpolated when passed to a custom property. That is a requirement in SCSS, see https://sass-lang.com/documentation/style-rules/declarations for more details.
• the CSS var() declaration can fallback to a second value if the first one is not available, as in, when writing var(--color1, red), CSS will fallback to the red color if the --color1 property is not found. In plugins, we use the SCSS color variables as fallbacks to ensure compatibility with previous versions of Discourse. So the earlier example, would look like this with a fallback:

-   background-color: $primary-very-low;
+   background-color: var(--primary-very-low, $primary-very-low);