description

These snippets automatically switches your theme to a custom page-admin.tpl.php layout file so a custom administrators theme is activated when needed.

Useful if you're using a fixed-width site design and your administration pages breaks the layout or where you want to add editing tips to where the sidebar blocks normally appear when a user is creating/editing content.

usage

1. Make a copy of your page.tpl.php file and rename it to page-admin.tpl.php.
2. Using a text editor like notepad.exe or equivalent, copy the preferred snippet into the template.php in your theme folder.
3. Edit your page-admin.tpl.php layout file to suit.
4. Upload your new page-admin.tpl.php layout file and your edited template.php file to your active theme folder

Admin theme switcher

This snippet is not really necessary for Drupal 5.x which has an out-of-the-box feature that allows you to specify an administration theme from the Drupal administration pages.

<?php 
/**
* This snippet tells Drupal to load up a different page-admin.tpl.php layout 
* files automatically. For use in the template.php file.
*
* This works with and Drupal 4.7, Drupal 5.x
*/

function _phptemplate_variables($hook, $variables = array()) {
  switch ($hook) {
    case 'page':
      if ((arg(0) == 'admin')) {
        $variables['template_file'] = 'page-admin';
      }
      break;
  }

  return $variables;
}
?>

Add/Edit theme switcher

The following snippet switches the theme layout for both ADMIN and when a user is editing or creating new content. A simple example application might be to display some editing tips where the sidebars normally appear.

<?php 
/**
* This snippet tells Drupal to load up a different page-admin.tpl.php layout 
* files automatically for admin pages and add/edit pages. 
* For use in the template.php file.
*
* This works with and Drupal 4.7, Drupal 5.x
*/

function _phptemplate_variables($hook, $variables = array()) {
  switch ($hook) {
    case 'page':
      if ((arg(0) == 'node' && arg(1) == 'add') ||  (arg(0) == 'node' && arg(2) == 'edit')) {
        $variables['template_file'] = 'page-admin';
      }
      break;
  }

  return $variables;
}
?>