Page template across themes

Question

Is it possible to make a page template available to multiple or all themes without having to save the page template in every single theme folder?

Maybe something like: themes/globalform.php instead of doing this for each theme themes/twentyten/globalform.php

Answer 1

I believe you have to make a plugin for that. The following code is based on this answer: Is it possible to define a template for a custom post type within a plugin independent of the active theme?

/*
Plugin Name: Universal Template
Plugin URI: https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/57211
Description: Uses a custom template in the plugin directory accordding to Conditional Tags (http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags), maybe even other conditions
Version: 1.0
Author: brasofilo
Author URI: https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/users/12615
*/

class Universal_Template
{

    public function __construct()
    {       
        $this->url = plugins_url( '', __FILE__ );   
        $this->path = plugin_dir_path( __FILE__ );
        add_action( 'init', array( $this, 'init' ) );
   }

    public function init() 
    {
        add_filter( 'template_include', array( $this, 'wpse_57211_my_plugin_templates' ) );
    }


    public function wpse_57211_my_plugin_templates( $template ) 
    {
        $post_types = array( 'post' );

        if ( is_post_type_archive( $post_types ) )
            $template = $this->path . '/single-custom.php';

        if ( is_singular( $post_types ) )
            $template = $this->path . '/single-other-custom.php';

        return $template;
    }

}

$wpse_57211 = new Universal_Template();

Answer 2

You could put files in wordpress/wp-content/themes and then include them from various themes. You could even make a folder named wordpress/wp-content/themes/global-includes or shared.

For me, including a file from the parent directory I couldn't just do:

<?php include_once "../globalform.php"; ?>

Instead I needed to do:

<?php include_once get_template_directory() . "/../globalform.php"; ?>

You could also use get_stylesheet_directory() (gets child theme directory) instead of get_template_directory() (will get parent theme directory if the current theme is a child theme. Since we're getting the parent directory it probably doesn't matter here.