How to construct a magento theme demo site? [closed]

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Closed 8 years ago.

Now I need to construct a magento theme demo site holding dozens of themes, but there are several problems remaining to to be solved.

1. Usuallly, administrators can change a site's theme through admin panel, but this is unfriendly and inefficient to users. Is it possible to set the theme programmatically, in order to allow users choosing themes in the frontend to see the effects?

2. According to my understanding, when a user chooses to try some theme, the demo site will change its theme settings accordingly. So, how to hold themes on a single site and allow users browsing them simultaneously without interference?

Hope for good suggestions. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Set up one multi-store Magento install, and set each storefront to a new theme.

This can be done under the store view scope of system > config > general > design > theme / package

I see the ability to set up each site as subdomains and use a frameset or an iframe to provide the switching from theme to theme.

Setting up a storefront / site in Magento takes nearly zero disk space as all it requires is a subfolder, an htaccess file, index.php and 3 symlinks. See here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/tutorial-multi-site-multi-domain-setup

In essence, your 'dozens' of themes would all be storefronts within Magento that you could iframe with a store switcher.