Remote Wordpress Theme

CMS & WordPress
1

I’v developed a wordpress theme that I’m calling “Remote Wordpress”. It is for people with mutiple websites that have unique copies of wordpress and want to use the same theme on each site. This diagram explains what it does:

Main site

  • Remote Wordpress theme (changes made to this theme will be seen on all sites loading this theme)

Site 2:

  • Wordpress installed - showing Unique Content 1
  • Remote Wordpress theme loader

Site 3:

  • Wordpress installed - showing Unique Content 2
  • Remote Wordpress theme loader

Site 4:

  • Wordpress installed - showing Unique Content 3
  • Remote Wordpress theme loader

As you can see, each website running Wordpress loads its theme from Main Site and also displays it’s own unique content. This system has been very useful for the company I work for that has over 900 domains, hundreds of which are running the Remote Wordpress theme. Variables can be added to the Remote Wordpress Theme that would change depending on the domain loading the theme.

I am posting this because I wanted to get feedback on this idea; would something like this interest you? How could this system be modified to interest you? Comments/Criticism/Suggestions?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

2

I can see some uses for that, sure. If I were the one coding it, it’d be a plugin that acts identically to most software updaters – this plugin makes a short request to the master server for the current version number of the theme. If this number is greater than the locally installed version, it downloads the theme (zipped at some URL on the mater server), extracts it to the theme’s directory, and updates the local version number.

Since you can do all the same things in a theme’s functions.php file as in a separate plugin, if it makes sense for you, the updater can be part of the theme. That lets the updater update itself as well as the theme, since they are part of the same archive.