I have been working on a theme, initially it only had one design and I made almost all of the front page elements customizable through the theme customizer. Now I would like to offer a few variations of my theme and I am not sure what I should do. The way I setup my theme is that is that when my theme is installed it looks like the demo, since I made the default values of the theme settings match the design. So the defaults are all setup for the one style.
Now since I want to offer a few variations of my theme it makes sense to use child themes that the users can switch to. Although I have no idea how that would work, since most of the elements get there values from the theme settings and not the CSS file so they can be easily customized. Would I not be able to use child themes?
Would it make more sense for me to add a setting for which style is chosen and have my customizer choose different default values depending on that setting? (Have three sets of defaults values in a function, and use logic to choose which defaults are used depending on theme chosen?)
I want to be able to have a demo bar to show the theme variations. So would it be possible to have a child theme that overrides the customizer aswell? So I could switch to a child theme easily in the demo bar?
Any advice would be appreciated.