Let me preface this by saying I've searched drupal.org for this question/answer, and maybe I missed it, but I've not seen what I need out there.
We are building a new site about college sports, and one of the requirements is that we have different themes based on the team. In other words, if someone is reading a story about Auburn football, we want the theme to be built around Auburn's colors and mascot. If you know college sports fans, you know how big a deal this is, and how important it is to get Auburn's theme instead of Alabama's on that page.
Now, I've looked around for ways to do this, and the things I've seen are close to what we need, but not quite. Instead of individual files of auburn-page.tpl.php, alabama-page.tpl.php, etc, we'd like to make complete themes, because we already have some, it will be easier on the designers, and it makes things more customizable and compartmentalized. I've tried this with existing drupal themes and code based on what I've found here, creating a theme called "master" that will call other themes based on a taxonomy value viz:
<?php
/**
* This snippet loads up a different page-termname.tpl.php layout
* file based on the taxonomy term of the node.
*
* For use in a page.tpl.php file.
*
* This works with Drupal 4.7
*/
if ($is_front) {
include('../bluemarine/page.tpl.php');
return;
}