Category specific themes?

Question

My client wants to implement a special appearance to each of our category pages. Kind of like child themes... she wants to shift the background image, change a few graphics, and tweak the colors according to which category the user is visiting (horror, romance, etc).

Is there a reasonable way to do this besides creating a different template for each page with imported CSS styles? Or is that really the only path to accomplish this?

UPDATE: The answers below are all great. For our purposes, the easiest thing to do was to use the category specific classes provided by "body_class()" to override current styles.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If changes do not require modifications to HTML markup you can accomplish that by loading conditionally additional CSS style files. See Conditional Tags > A Category Page and wp_enqueue_style() in Codex.

Answer 2

The bulk of your theme is made up of three files, header.php, footer.php and style.css.

If you want to load an alternative header, footer and/or stylesheet simply update the appropriate calls inside the category template(category.php) to pull in a different header/footer/stylesheet.

Example.

get_header();

Becomes.

get_header( 'cat' );

Would then include header-cat.php instead of header.php.
You can do the same with the get_footer() call to include a different footer file.

Using alternate header/footer files is covered on the Codex pages.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_header
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_footer

For the stylesheet, simply change this(in your new header file).

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="<?php bloginfo( 'stylesheet_url' ); ?>" />

For something like..

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="<?php bloginfo( 'stylesheet_directory' ); ?>/style2.css" />

Or alternatively, use wp_enqueue_style as suggested in the other answer.

Completely custom HTML and CSS without effecting any other kinds of pages(and no changes needed to the existing header/footer/stylesheet).