Have you ever wanted to see how a new theme would look on your blog but didn’t want to mess with the user experience of your current readers? Have you ever wanted to try developing your own theme, but didn’t want to waste time making a development copy of your blog? If so, let me tell you about a plugin that you’re going to love.

I’ve been finding a lot of blogs lately that have the exact same theme as mine (GlossyBlue). This isn’t good, it hurts your reputation and your ability to have a unique identity. So to remedy that problem, I created my own theme design last night. I was (and still am) in the process of coding it when I realized that it would be a whole lot easier to do everything on the live blog. But how would I do that without showing everyone what I was working on?

ThemeSwitcher Solution

The popular forum software, vBulletin, has an option to set different skins (themes) for specific users. This was exactly what I wanted to do, but WordPress does not have an option for this, nor could I find any plugins that accomplished this task. But I kept searching.

Finally, I came across a plugin that seems to have been written two years ago. It’s called ThemeSwitcher and it lets anyone switch between the currently installed themes on a blog. All you have to do is add a small piece of code to your sidebar and it will automatically output a list of available themes. However, there is still one problem with this: I wanted to be the only person who was able to see my new theme.

This plugin appears to work by setting a cookie that tells WordPress what theme to use. All you have to do to place that cookie is visit one of the URLs that the plugin outputs. So what I did was install the plugin output code on a test page (a page that isn’t linked to the main blog) and voila, I now have a menu that only I know about and that lets me switch between all available themes on my blog.