A while back I tried to find a way to have a different WordPress theme on different pages within a WordPress website. The reason I needed it was because our church website design was great, but would not work as a blog because it’s designed to have everything on one page. Therefore, you want scrolling at a minimum which isn’t good for blogs. I wanted to have the page that showed the blog have a different theme but I couldn’t find anything that worked. To make it work I simply made the blog a separate site/blog within WordPress and themed it differently. You can see it here.

I recently wrapped up a similar design for a church and found a plugin that easily allowed me to use a different theme on different pages within WordPress. The plugin is fittingly called Page Theme. Once you install it you can find the settings under the Appearance section in the WP Admin. I love it because the user doesn’t have to go to a separate site within WordPress to update the blog.

UPDATE

In order to make this work in the way I mentioned (for a blog), you’ll have to modify the main theme’s single.php to use the blog theme’s single.php, while pointing to the blog theme’s header, footer & sidebar. I did this by copying header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php from the blog theme and putting them in the main theme as templates. So, they became header-blogtheme.php, footer-blogtheme.php, and sidebar-blogtheme.php and I changed the header to reference CSS and JS files from the blog theme folder. You can reference those specific templates but putting the name in the function call, like get_header(‘blogtheme’);

This is required because if not, when a user loads a single blog post it will revert back to the main theme.  It’s extra work and I don’t love how much the core theme files have to be changed but it’s easier for the end-user if they don’t have a lot of WordPress experience.

Have you used different themes on different pages? How?