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Hot Swapping of Drupal Themes
At the ParentsClick Network we are soon to be rolling out many more sites on our platform. Because of our unique community API (which I will be detailing in a future post) we are running many sites (many not yet released) on the same install of Drupal, with the same database, and no shared tables. Yes, no typos there. More on just how that works in a later post.
One thing we have to do is change the theme based on the URL, along with a host of other things. ZivTech recently posted about changing themes, but for our setup, we need something more low level. Hence this technique.
Edit your settings.php and stick this in at the bottom:
- // if the <span class="caps">URL</span> is an administration page
- if (strpos($_GET['q'], 'admin') === 0) {
- $conf['theme_default'] = 'garland';
- }
What this does is tell Drupal to load an entirely different theme then the default one. Bonus points if you noticed the Drupal 5 administration theme bug: it shows the admin theme but if you save any form, the theme switches from the admin one to the default one. The above snippet fixes that.
The only catch? Make sure you initialize this in your system table by visiting the themes page and make sure you theme is in the sites/all directory. Otherwise you can run into some funky issues.
Happy theme hot swapping!
8 comments
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Nice idea.
Maybe your could be improved with some checks – in order to be sure that “default” theme exists.
Hi,
do you use the Domain Access Module for all your sites?!
Looking forward to read how you realise that ;)
Tobi
does that last slash cause problems for the /admin page? seems like it would not match. -moshe
@Tobi – no, not using Domain Access :)
@Moshe – ah yes, thanks, good catch, forgot to test that on the root admin page
Oooh, handy, and simple! That bug always, er, bugged me.
Thanks for this hint, which actually fixes the Administration theme bug when submitting forms (really annoying one)
Well, testing further, it brings some bugs as side effect: I was using additional regions in my front end theme, and since this change, they don’t appear anymore in /admin/build/block : the theme files isn’t parsed looking up for regions.
See http://drupal.org/node/242200 for a better alternative (while should be considered as a bug with a proper fix)
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