Display a Different Theme Per Page or Post of Your WordPress Blog Site

More Than One Theme
On The Same Blog

Recently, I ran into yet another situation where a different – but related – theme would have been better for a certain post series I was working on… but that that hasn’t been possible in WordPress.

We know that we can add page templates to a theme but those are for pages and not everyone wants to hack on code in order to change the look of a post or page anyways.

So I went digging ….

First I found the Headspace 2 (Headspace SEO) plugin which can sorta do this… but I rejected it because using multiple SEO plugins is bad news and we need to be using WordPress SEO by Yoast unless our theme has SEO tools built in.

Fortunately, I found…

Page Theme For WordPress

I’m sure I’ve ignored this plugin before because the plugin name doesn’t actually indicate that it will also work for posts but it will!

You can find this plugin in your plugin search or in the repository: http://wordpress.org/plugins/page-theme/

• This plugin can be used to display a different theme for each page of your blog.
• This plugin can be used to display a different theme for each one of your blog posts.
• The interface used to configure this is very user-friendly. Even friendlier since v1.3.

Here’s a cool video, from Tarek Alaadin, that walks you through ow to use Page Theme for WordPress

Some suggestions:

• This plugin is a “hack” (work-around) to make this happen. Because of this, it’s a bit fiddly when it comes to having to switch back and forth to access the theme admin sections. There’s nothing wrong with that but you do have to accept that.

• Don’t use this as an excuse to set up a second site when it’s called for. Sometimes this will be a total time/life saver and other times you’re inviting bloat by doing this. Always think critically about your needs and aim to control site bloat.

• You will need to activate the secondary themes long enough to configure them so that the settings are in your database when the post/page calls that theme. Otherwise your stuck with the default views because you can’t access multiple admin panels at once.

• A good use of this is to allow you to use a sales page theme, for your sales pages, on your existing blog. (Although many times it’s better to choose a squeeze page plugin that is capable of adding templates instead.)

• I consider this an intermediary user plugin because of the number of moving parts, this plugin could quickly make a novices head swim!

A very handy plugin for certain projects.

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