This is really I think a “newbie” question

Yes, they’ll take on the look of the currently selected theme.

They will take on the look of the new theme which may be some “vanilla” look depending on the complexity of the new theme. Also, any editing of the files in your old theme will not show up, obviously, in your new theme until you edit those files also.

That’s a very good point, AlanSmithee. The sidebar is (IMO) a necessary pain the rear. I like to manually add things to it quite often, but if I used a theme switcher, I’d also have to manually add to every sidebar in every theme in order to keep them all current.

Why, thank you kind sirs! That’s good, I’m glad to know that, because I haven’t any pages as yet so I should be able to get it right the first time. Maybe.

Plus: A page can be either associated with a template you create for that purpose. If not it will follow the template hierarchy.

@ macmanc – I have been wondering if when the header loads it should not automagically update all our themes from one common file. Just saying. ??

Root – that is what styles and the style switcher are for. On my site I use both. If one wants the same theme but a different style then they shouldn’t mess with adding themes. (oops, I am logged in under my alias for another site)

-Beel

Not really. The point is about adding functionality to the sidebar or any other common part.. If every theme has its own and we want to add a tag we need to edit all over. Just about the only bit that always loads is the header.

That’s a great idea, Root, but I think it would be hard to implement due to the wide variations in theme coding. For example, there appears to be many different uses for h1, h2, and h3. Some list the sidebar sections has h2s, some are just strong text, etc. There are, of course, many more variations than that. And, though WordPress is standards-based, I don’t think the theme development community would react well to theme standards.

Well my new header thingy would certainly bork on my own theme hackage anyway ??

Couldn’t you edit all your theme’s sidebar.php files (if any) to call another .php file that has the sidebar coding the way you want it? If you put that php include in each of your theme’s sidebar templates, hopefully, that will allow you to make all your changes/additions to ONE file and one file only? (I’m the world’s laziest here and it would seem that would simplify things.)

Hah! Joni, two minds with but a single thought! I was just now looking at this very thing. Truly, there’s no reason you couldn’t do that. Php is php, includes is includes, it works the way it works no matter who produces the files.

Bingo…. maybe. (Y’all may note that’s pretty much my favorite word when it comes to this sort of stuff….)

Yeah, that might solve the sidebar issue. However there is another potential problem – and the users hardly realize it -, namely if you have a customized Page template in your favourite theme, and later you switch to another one (or add the theme switcher) the Pages created with that sepcial template might look not-so-good in the new setting.

moshu, that was I think really what I was trying to ask originally…. since I have no pages now, it’s not a problem, but should I decide to make pages in future, and keep the theme switcher (***see below), then I may have problems with pages unless I want to do intensive tweaking.

Now, I’m not averse to tweaking – in fact, I find it a great deal of fun, and only my husband gets in on the not-repeatable-in-polite-company cursing which happens when things don’t go the way I thought they should (and since we’ve been married thirty years, he just rolls his eyes and goes outside to mess with the horses….)

But then again, I don’t want to set myself up for a full-time job as above either….

*** theme switcher: I’m like a chinook wind blowing from here today and there tomorrow: no one theme will ever be “right” day in day out. So whatever I do will pretty much require figuring in something in the nature of the theme switcher…. [I still need the random theme changer, but got so sidetracked with the problem a couple of weeks back I never got any farther on with it. Aaron Brazell thought he might come up with something….]

Thinking about how advanced this topic getting, I really have to laugh at its title, “This is really I think a “newbie” question.”