Theme Editor Alternative

April 21, 2009

As an alternative to enabling the theme editor in the Wordpress MU, I came across a MU Plugin named RDG Custom Style Sheet. The plugin gives the user access to change the style.php sheet only within the Admin Dashboard.

Here are the plugin’s features:

Adds an editor to the Design Menu of the WordPress admin area. This is basically a redesigned Theme Editor that you will find in a standard WordPress installation, though it only allows Stylesheets to be edited and only Stylesheets that are located in the Blogs Upload directory.
Allows users to Preview their Stylesheet changes before saving them, allowing them to make changes without visitors to their blog seeing the changes until they are saved.
Creates a blank style sheet with usage instructions for the current Theme when the editor is opened. If the user changes themes, it will create a new stylesheet for that them. This allows users to maintain different stylesheets for different themes (if they change their theme).
Creates a login.css stylesheet that is used to customize the blogs login.php screen.
Will automatically use a ’sitewide’ login stylesheet if the user has not designed one for their own individual blog (if one exists)
Can easily be coded to be enabled only if a user has ‘paid’ for a custom stylesheet option. By default, on my MU site, users must pay for the feature. I use the premium upgrades plugin available at http://premium.wpmudev.org. If you are not running this plugin, the plugin will always insert the custom stylesheets if they exist.

There are still many security concerns with a plugin like this, however it does limit the access to the theme files and provides access to what most users want to modify.

You can find the plugin here.