Can I make jonradio Multiple Themes work?

[Ella Ivshin]

Hi, thank you for helping me earlier with the date icon.

A more pressing issue has come up. I apologize in advance for this issue’s complexity and relation to a 3rd party plugin but after working on it for many hours I have exhausted all other options. I have nearly found a way to make the jonradio Multiple Themes plugin work the way I want with the three themes I want to use on my site – Celestial Reloaded, Encounters, and Luminescence. Celestial is the main website, Encounters is the “hardcover” front page of the journal and organizer of ancillary journal-related pages, and Luminescence is the actual journal entries and categories.

To illustrate:
Celestial Main: http://unbrokenessence.com/
Encounters “Blog Cover”: http://unbrokenessence.com/journey/
Luminescence “Blog”: http://unbrokenessence.com/category/journey/part-1/

There appears to be two blocking issues:

1) I can keep Celestial Reloaded as my “current theme” to manage the Top 1, Top 2, Top 3, Top 4 widget regions that are common to the Celestial and Encounters templates I want to use for the different pages (I used your guides and snippets to make little static showcases and show/hide the widgets per page as needed using Widget Logic). However, Luminescence’s side bar widget area is generic compared to the specific Left/Right ones in Celestial and Encounters – so I can’t manage its widgets “from afar”. I can’t swap into Luminescence without all my other widgets getting dumped out, despite the arcane tricks I’ve tried. It seems like I would have to manually edit at least one of the theme’s widget region code to make the system assume that the sidebar widget regions are analogous, correct?

2) I can’t upload a different header image for the “front page” on the Celestial Main Page and the “front page” on the Encounters Blog Cover Page using the built in way under Appearance>Header. As a workaround, I am trying to edit header.php for Encounters to hardcode in the header image I want but with my limited PHP knowledge (my experience is in non-web programming languages) I don’t know where to start. Could you point me in the right direction?

Is this insurmountable? Or requiring of so many code changes (aka time) that a redesign is the only sane solution? I am starting to think I should have gone with WordPress Multisite/Network for this setup.

Thank you

EDIT: I am using and keeping my tweaking contained in your provided child themes for each.
Screenshot2014-01-0711.33.47.png
Screenshot2014-01-0711.33.14.png

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[Sushil Adhikari]

I honestly hate to give bad news but this is really related to end-user customization which isn’t really part of support. I’m also not familiar with that multiple themes plugin, so how this thing works, I do not know (interesting though). I’m trying to figure out what kind of a setup you are wanting to do, but it sounds extremely complicated and never heard of someone trying to do what you are attempting. Have you done this before with other themes?

Please note that each theme has different layouts and structures, as well as css and functionality from each other, so I think you will find this will be hard to achieve. I would believe a multi-site option is the better solution, especially when there are theme updates, WordPress updates, and plugin updates that could cause more headaches down the road.

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