Sub-Theme (based on Taxonomies)

Question

This feels like a fairly simple question, though I fear, may be a complicated answer. Is there an way (via plugin or code) to make a theme change some basic CSS elements based on a taxonomy term.

So if you have camera brands, and you site is all about cameras. Can you have pages about Kodak use a CSS file where colors are blue, and if Cannon it uses a CSS file that is red, etc. Basically you sub-theme your theme based on a taxonomy term?

Answer 1

Yes, you can. In many ways.

One way is to have custom templates based on tag or category slug. So, you just tag your posts appropriately and then WordPress will automatically select appropriate template.

If the template difference are miniscule, you can use php includes or wordpress includes to keep common content in other files.

Or you could do a custom include based on the value of the tag from the main theme file and provide CSS reference that way.

Or have inline CSS again controlled by php code inside the template.

Answer 2

There are several ways to approach this, mostly depending on how major changes in styling are going to be:

• filter output of body_class() function (or wait for 3.1 in which according to docs terms are going to be included automatically) and including style differences in your main stylesheet;
• echo additional styling inline (preferably when amount is minimal);
• load additional stylesheets.

See Conditional Tags for how to check for different stuff and wp_enqueue_style() for loading additional stylesheets.