Asymetrical Drupal themes

"have u discovered a snippet that will over-ride and switch off all blocks for a page/section?"

YES - changes to block handling are in the current CVS version right now - and I suspect will be availabe in the 4.6 release. It does exactly what you are asking for.

re: how to implement this solution - yes - that's pretty much it. I personally keep this code in a seperate file in the template directory - and I include it at the top of the template page.

as bèr points out however, if you expect a lot of traffic this may slow things down a bit as caching won't work.

andre

Cheers Bér

Will the sections.module (CVS version) work with 4.5.0 (which is what I'm using or do I need to tweak it myself?

Jason

Redundant ifs - yes in that example.

Just as easily done putting everything in a function, calling if elseif's and breaking out of the function on a match.

function stylechoice(){

    global $base_url;
    $base = parse_url($base_url);
    $session = session_name() .'='. session_id();
    $url = str_replace(array($base['path'], '?'. $session), '', request_uri());
    $url = ereg_replace('^/(\?q=)?', '', $url);

	$url_pattern_admin = "/admin/i";
	$url_pattern_about = "/about/i";
	$url_pattern_news  = "/news/i";
	$url_pattern_resources = "/resources/i";
	$url_pattern_search = "/search/i";
	$url_pattern_clients = "/clients/i";

	$mystyle = "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" href=\"$base_url/themes/themename/defaultstylesheet.css\"  type=\"text/css\" />";
	
	if(preg_match($url_pattern_admin, $url)){
		$mystyle = "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" href=\"$base_url/themes/themename/stylesheetforadmin.css\"  type=\"text/css\" />";
		return $mystyle;
	}
elseif(preg_match($url_pattern_about, $url)){ 
//dostuff 
return $mystyle;}
//etc.
return $mystyle;

Breaks Caching - how so? I have caching enabled, and everything loads perfectly well. The page is already pulled from cache by the time it gets themed anyway (or am I completely off base on my understanding of the drupal mechanism).

Besides, this is the only solution that works efficiently if you have a properly designed theme and set of css files. i.e. you don't use a single file to handle all your styles. The styles I pull in for my example only handle the changes in the page. Other files handle layout and positioning.

The $mystyle variable is only the stylesheet that handles the differences between pages (all the similarities are handled by different style sheets).

Why add the overhead of maintaining multiple themes just to have different looks for different sections, when all you need is a different stylesheet to handle partial changes. (a background image, a couple of colour changes).

sections.module has its place, but for something as simple as a site with a handful of sections, this it is overkill and makes more work for the designer and maintainer of the site.

Now if you are right about the caching breaking, then I'll be quiet ;-)

andre