Template variations

[rick76]

So I set up WPMU on my Joomla site and assigned a template to the admin blog page. Now I want to create 5 or 6 other blogs, each with a slight variation in the look and feel of the template -- mainly in the header area. Do I need to build WP themes that match my Joomla template and then assign them in the individual blog admin areas? Or is there a way to create variations of my original Joomla template and somehow use those?

Sorry if I'm asking obvious questions -- I've watched the videos and read the documentation and I'm still trying to get my head around how this works 

Thanks!

[rsokhi]

Anything?

[rsokhi]

How I would go about it is based on the name on of the blog.  If you go to the header.php file, there's definitely code that queries and then displays the name of the blog...that's how it knows what to display.  Armed with that info, you can insert a few if-statements into the header.php file.  I.e., if blog = "A", then echo "AAA", if blog = "B", then echo "BBB".

Should work.  I'm working on something like this myself, but other issues are coming up.  Namely that there seems to be a bug in the Every Home template.  The post author is not passing to "the_author()", so the post author does not display over each post.  Sucks.

[Rafael Corral]

The EveryHome template is a very special template, as it hardly uses any of the WordPress functions to build its output, because it pulls the posts (with content) site-wide. So if you want the author to display, you can just edit the SQL query in the home.php file in that template.

Also make sure you have the latest version.

As for using different templates for WordPress, you have to keep in mind that the templates will only show up right inside the component area of Joomla, although the stylesheets can affect the whole Joomla page.
Also, if you want to migrate an existing WordPress template into Joomla, see this video:
http://vimeo.com/4111348

[rick76]

Thanks for the replies. I ended up using Wordpress MU instead of the Joomla version and was able to easily create multiple variations of my template and assign them to the various blogs. I'm not much of a programmer and unfortunately just couldn't figure out how to make this happen with Wordpress MU for Joomla. Sorry, Raphael!