Overview #
Do you have multiple themes that are basically the same? Right now if you want to make a change to all of your sites, you likely have to commit the same code to each theme repository. This is time-consuming and requires more effort on both your and our part. By using a shared theme, changes made to one site can, at your discretion, be applied to all of your sites.
There are various techniques to implement a common theme.
Code-level Configuration #
The trick is to replace any per-theme code with some code that is wrapped in conditional tags. Many of our VIPs create configuration arrays in their functions.php and then switch to the different configurations based on the value of home_url(). Here’s a quick example on how to approach this:
add_action( 'init', 'my_init_site', 1 ); // let's initialize our settings very early on
/**
* Initilize settings based on the site url
*/
function my_init_site() {
global $my_settings;
$my_settings = array();
switch ( parse_url( home_url(), PHP_URL_HOST ) ) {
case 'cooltechreviewsite.com':
$my_settings['twitter_username'] = 'cooltechreviewsite';
break;
case 'coolfoodiesite.com':
$my_settings['twitter_username'] = 'coolfoodiesite';
break;
}
}
/**
* Function gets a setting by name
*/
function my_get_site_setting( $name, $default_value = '' ) {
global $my_settings;
return isset( $my_settings[$name] ) ? $my_settings[$name] : $default_value;
}
function my_twitter_link() {
$my_twitter_username = my_get_site_setting( 'twitter_username' );
if( ! empty( $my_twitter_username ) )
printf( '<a href="%s">Follow us on Twitter!</a>', esc_url( 'http://twitter.com/' . $my_twitter_username ) );
}
Options Panel #
A better, but more involved, solution is to use a settings page to control the per-theme settings. CheezCAP makes this easier. Going this route will allow you to change settings without having to commit code changes and is especially useful on a large network of sites.
