By Jeroen Coumans on

I'm migrating from Mambo/Joomla to Drupal. There are two things which I currently miss in Drupal, and I wonder if there are any easy solutions for this.

The first thing is the ability to link themes to users. In Mambo/Joomla, the public site is separated from the administrator interface with a different theme. Is something similar for Drupal possible? Designing a theme kinda breaks the ability to administer the site, especially if you're still messing with the template engine.

The second thing, closely related to the first, is the ability to link themes to content. In Mambo/Joomla, it was possible to assign templates to menu items. This makes it very easy to implement a different stylesheet, or even a splash page.

Any help is kindly appreciated :)

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.6.x, Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

Ayman’s picture

Ayman commented

1) If there is more than one theme enabled (in admin/themes) users can choose what theme they want to use in their profile page.

2) Sections module can do this.

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Ayman Hourieh
http://aymanh.com/

Jeroen Coumans’s picture

Jeroen Coumans commented

The ability to hook accounts to templates is even better then theming based on path (although I will certainly look at the section module). I created a role called "Designer" and hooked up the development theme to this account. This allows me to design a template without disturbing anyone else!

Thanks Ayman!

thrice’s picture

thrice commented

Could you spell out exactly what you did? I need to do the same thing!

Jeroen Coumans’s picture

Jeroen Coumans commented

All I did was create a specific user role called "designer", which I gave access to all theme-related things, like blocks and themes. Then I created an account for this role and assigned it a special theme for development. After that, I started hacking the theme, without disturbing other users' themes. This is in 4.7 beta 3, by the way.
Let me know if you need more info!

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

Sometimes you don't want your normal users to be able to change to the devel theme, so we introduced a permission "select different theme" so that you can let some roles (developer, themer) switch themes, and other (anonymous, authenticated) don't get that choice. This change would be easy to backport to 4.6.

That, plus the path-based theme switching, can fit most of your needs.

The latest version of the CivicSpace theme also divides the site up into an admin section and has a nice admin theme that they use, so you might want to check that out.

- Robert Douglass

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My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress