One cool thing you can do with WordPress these days is let your visitors choose the theme they want to see on your website (of course, if you have many of them installed).

What is a Theme Chooser For WordPress?

It’s an addon for WordPress that makes it possible for your visitors to change the layout they want to see with just a click of a mouse. Yep, that’s possible and very easy to implement. First, you need to have multiple themes installed on your WordPress blog. Where to find them? It’s simple: google will give you all the answers you need. Just do a search for “free wordpress theme” or other related terms, and you’ll find a dozen of free themes to add to your blog. The next step is to upload them. Once you have them on your computer, unzip and use your ftp client to upload them and last, activate them from your admin area.

The next step is to ‘install a WordPress theme chooser add-on‘. By default, WordPress offers you the possibility to upload as many themes as you want, but use only one at a time. However, you can change that. How? With an addon. You have two options for this task.

The first one is “theme preview“. This one will allow your visitors to choose from a list of themes and preview them in the browser. Although there is a single theme activated as the main one and all the visitors will see it when they land on your blog for the first time, they will be able to switch to another one very easy. You don’t even need to install the themes. To install this plugin, just download it from the wordpress plugins website, unzip, upload to your server and activate it from the “plugins” menu in the admin area, then access your blog with an URL in this format: www.yourblogdomainname.com/index.php?preview_theme=some_theme (of course, change “some_theme” with your theme name). That’s it, test it and let me know if it works … or not :)

The second option is “Theme switcher“. This plugin does the same as the first one. To install it, just upload it to your plugins folder and then activate it from your admin area then add your themes as they say on the instructions page (you can find it in the settings menu). They offer 2 formats: full list or dropdown.

To conclude, if you want to let your visitors view your blog the way they want, you have at least 2 possibilities to do that, so you can’t say it’s impossible, even if your tech skills keep you far away from beeing an expert in this area. The theme chooser for WordPress makes it possible.

Hope this helps,

- Peter

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Filed under: General • Wordpress How To • Wordpress Plugins • Wordpress Themes

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