128 PART II • Designing and Developing WordPress Themes
If your users have access to several themes and pick whichever they like to use, remember to
not make the parent theme available to them in the Network Admin (see Figure 5-2). By just
enabling the child themes, you give your users the features of your parent theme, but they can
choose only from the child themes you have enabled. This way, you can make sure that they
aren’t using a theme that might not be meant for public usage.Figure 5-2: If you have enabled the multisite feature, you can choose which themes your users have access to in the Network Admin.MANAGING DESIGN FOR MULTIPLE SITES
First, find the common elements in your design. Granted, because most people don’t launch a
series of sites built on the same basic look but rather pilfer themes and designs left and right,
it may even be a better idea to start from scratch and create a basic design to build on and
customize. There are several big-name blog networks that employ this method today, so look
around.Second, after finding all the common elements your sites will need, you should wireframe the
main parent theme design. Make room for everything, think about what may go where, and
plan ahead.Third, create the parent theme. This should be as simple and stripped down as possible,
containing only the things that all your sites will use. If an element isn’t common to all your
sites, ignore it and define it in the child themes instead. A common mistake is to add too
much style to the parent theme because it just looks bland and boring otherwise. Don’t do
that; you’ll just end up overriding your own code in the child theme’s template files, and that
is code that has already been read once. Why make your themes slower to load, after all?