Duplicative Templates

  • So, I love the whole themes concept; it works great and all, but I do have one (small) issue with it. If I make modifications to a theme—the sidebar for instance—by adding in non WP-managed links, links to Bloglines, or whatever; in order for these to be persistent across multiple themes (if I wanted to provide several themes for my users to choose between), I would have to duplicate this code across every available theme and update it in each theme package everytime I wanted to make a change.

    Code duplication is Bad ™ So what can be done about this? Any solutions that jump to mind? I suppose I need a file that stores custom adjustments to a WP template that exists independently of the theme structure, but that each theme can call on at will.

    That sounds great, but I wouldn’t know where to begin, my knowledge of the WP architecture being shaky at best. Any suggestions?

Viewing 3 replies - 16 through 18 (of 18 total)

  • I wouldn’t change anything in the default theme directory since that directory can be overwritten during upgrade. We encourage everyone to make a copy of the default theme in another theme directory and edit things there. That point aside, I’d probably go with the suggestion of desk003.

    Thread Starter danweasel

    (@danweasel)

    If I were more comfortable with plugin design, I might go that route; try to design something to this (and other) purposes. Any thoughts on a place to go to get introed to working with plugins?

    I’d like to create a theme using less than a full set of template files. When WP needs a file that doesn’t exist in the theme folder, it would fall back on either a specified theme or the default theme. In this way, my theme would inherit future updates to the default theme for any files that it didn’t contain.

    Has anyone come up with a way to implement this? The stylesheet-only method isn’t quite enough, but the full-template-files method is more than I need or want.

    The stylesheet-or-everything approach also means that most people are going to have unneccessarily outdated themes.

Viewing 3 replies - 16 through 18 (of 18 total)
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