A Place For Stephen

I discovered a new - well new to me anyways - plugin last night which allows visitors to my site to change the theme they are seeing.

Considering this site is supposed to be a testing bed, then I thought it would be a good idea to install here…

So look to the sidebar - down near the bottom - and you’ll see the available themes you can choose.

The choices are a bit limited right now (to the default WP themes) but I will be adding new ones that grab my attention!

UPDATE NOVEMBER 2008 - Following a problem with Google thinking this was a malware attack by my site, and therefore labeling my SERPS as “possibly harmful to your computer”, I have disabled this “feature”.

Consider offering this as a “normal” function on your site!

It gives your visitors a little more choice in what they can do or see - and adds to site “stickability”.

JUST REMEMBER to include the theme switcher code in the sidebar of EVERY THEME you install.

You will ALSO need to make changes to the other pages of the theme to give it the functionality you like… but they may not work as you think.

For example, with the WordPress Classic theme I tried to include the_excerpt tag on the main index page to show summaries of the posts on the home page.

That worked, but when I clicked through to the actual page, I found out it uses the same code and showed only the except. NOT useful at all….

In this theme, there is NO different single_post.php page to change so that modification couldn’t be used. Oh well…

At least a couple of the previously installed plug-ins still worked without touching anything in the theme editor - specifically, popularity contest and UTW.

But with WP-Print, I had to enter the code on the index template - just after the post, and before the comments.

It’s all good fun though… and through experimentation like this, you learn!

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