Multiple Templates

[Ahkamden]

I was wondering if anyone can give some tips or pointers on how to go about multiple different templates for a member registered site.

For example with Yahoo you can change the colors of the layout, using different basic css files.

What I am looking for is different layouts depending on the style you select. IE: There may be one that list friends in the upper right hand corner, Or the lower left hand depending on template. But users should be able to set their default template.

For a little more background info it's using LAMP, PHP5.

Would this concept be hard to implement? Or other concepts, such as member photos, which is right now a separate page. But was thinking of a small slide show on the members page, only if they select that template.

Thanks
Ahk

[rogerd]

Is this a custom-coded site, Ahkamden? The major forum and CMS packages generally have user-switchable templates as an option. Within each template design, you can control a lot of features in addition to the appearance.

Probably the only place where you could run into trouble is if the mods you want require modifying underlying PHP files that aren't part of the template system. That could get a little messier, although I suppose you could code in some kind of a test to see which template the user had activated. This would be messy, though, and make software updating more difficult.

[Ahkamden]

Hey roger,

Sorry took me a few days to respond.

We are using a custom CMS. That isn't nearly as intuitive as drupal or joomla. Right now I just have the ability to let users switch between colors.

But from what you mentioned. I guess, I don't foresee it being too hard to incorporate other complete template designs as long as the underlying functions are already there. So in essence I'm hoping it's just CSS/layout changes.