How to Create a WordPress Theme Viewer
For WordPress veteran this might not be new, which is, let visitor preview multiple themes in one WordPress installation. It puzzled me quite a while before I figured out how to do it. The very reason for the need of this feature is that I want to allow regular users to view different themes on a WordPress powered website. I wasn't able to until I ran into this page. Yea right! A theme switcher. I installed this plugin and tested. It provides the exact function that I need. Fantastic.
Now here comes the interesting stuff. The official documentation documented the plugin is as follow, which outputs a list of links that can switch to a specific theme:
<li>Themes:
<?php wp_theme_switcher(); ?>;
</li>
If you view HTML source of those links, you'll find something similar to this:
index.php?wptheme=THEME_NAME
This is very useful because now I can build a WordPress theme viewer by this plugin alone. Let's say you have a number of WordPress themes installed and you want to show a demonstration of each to your visitors with a text link Test Run. You can easily accomplish this by appending the name of the theme to the wptheme parameter:
<a href="/?wptheme=THEME_NAME">Test Run</a> or <a href="/index.php?wptheme=THEME_NAME">Test Run</a>
The question now is how to find out the name of the theme. Easy enough, just log into Admin area and go to Presentation tab, where you can see a detail list of themes including their names. Even easier, under each theme folder, you can find a file called style.css, in which you can find theme name of the theme there.
You've just created a WordPress theme viewer.
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Hi, thank you so much for this post. This really help me a lot. I wanna know how create a Test Run for lont time. I put the information in my site, and a link to your post. Thank you again. :)
And don't forget to add a link BACK to the original theme. I used a theme switcher plugin and then annoyingly forgot to link back to the main theme. Fortunately, I fixed it.
(As for the question asked by the spam commenters, it's a legitimate one and the answer is to install Wordpress on your computer itself.)
Thanks for the info its really helpful.
Thanks Def helped out a lot.
thanks, giving it a try and will let you know how it worked out
Thanks for this - great idea.
Nice post man i just signed up to flickr to!
i want to share my free wordpress theme here.
Preview:
http://www.elegantthemes.com/preview/eVid/
Download:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/6uv0n2
Thanks, just what I needed, I will try it out.
I really love to try it out. This is something new
Hmm. Good post.
Thanks for the great tips.
Hello, thanks for your good tips. I am looking for similar plugin but able to auto preview/test run all themes that we installed. Any idea about this?
Sample: http://wordpressthemesbase.com/
What plugin are they using?
nice article,Thanks for the great tips.
keep sharing
good information thanks!
This is a great tip. I appreciate your time and effort to get the message out.
Thanks for this - great idea.
http://www.windowreplacementsite.com
Great information keep up the good work
Nice one. I have stumbled and twittered this for my friends. Hope others find it as interesting as I did.
veryy nice
Great information keep up the good work