I’ve been using the Theme Switcher plugin for WordPress on my own comic for a while. What it does is let’s anyone choose which theme they want from your theme’s folder. When I redid my site with the new name, I kept the old theme on there for people who still wanted to keep it the old way. One theme is hard enough work to design and keep up, but for those wanting to provide the best in viewing options. I’m personally planning on making another clean and simple theme to choose from for slower or mobile connections.

IF YOU ARE UPGRADING COMICPRESS READ THIS:

I’ve recently found a new use for the Theme Switcher though. I’m making the switch on my site from ComicPress 1.6 CE to 2.0 BE*. Rather than making the theme switcher available to readers, you can use it for yourself to test out a new theme and edit it live while your readers are still happily viewing the default theme. After installing the theme switcher. You just use a URL to change what theme you want to view on your own computer (instead of making a menu available to your viewers to theme switch). You will want to call one of the themes Test or something, change the name in the “style.css” file and it will need to be installed into a different folder on the server, perhaps “Test”. Then to set the new one active on your computer just type the following URL in your browser:

http://yoursite.com/?wptheme=Test

If there are spaces in the theme name, just replace them with a “+”. To see this in action, you can go here to see my site with a theme called “On the Rocks”:

http://wallyandosborne.com/?wptheme=On+the+Rocks

or here to see it with a theme called “Wally & Osborne”:

http://wallyandosborne.com/?wptheme=Wally+&+Osborne

The theme uses a cookie to remember what theme a particular user has selected. When you disable the plugin, it will just go back to the one you have selected. When the Test Site looks good, you can rename it back to ComicPress and copy it to over your “comicpress” theme folder. Then you can still have your Test theme for making further changes and testing stuff out. The new WordPress 2.2 is actually suppose to have an option to test out plugins as well, before applying them to your live site.

* I had originally built the CE version for myself because I felt the comic and blog formed one daily chunk of content together for the readers. But more recently I was no longer able to make that daily schedule, and I do want to get back to it, but I also think it would be nice to have news items that didn’t leave the front page. Basically, the new BE version came out so slick I want to use it now too even though I originally just created it for those asking for separate blog posting ability. Everybody wins.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 9:07 pm and is filed under WordPress Plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.