Question: Dynamic Styles With PHP

[skilletsteve]

Hey,
I'm just wondering if it would be possible to make dynamic stylesheets on a php document.
example: have several style sheets (style1.css, style2.css, style3.css, etc...) and have the PHP document randomly load a different one each time, to keep the page fresh to the visitor.

If it is possible, any pointers on how to do it?

thanks a lot
-Steve

[John]

Its possible, Joomla! does it, but I have no idea how its done

[Jordan]

Yes, this is possible. The theme I have in Joomla! does it (CodeCall - Home - look at the color buttons in top). It is done using PHP. If the user selects the #default tag it loads one color style sheet named default.css.

[Centreri]

Very easy to do and many ways to do it. The simplest one is to make a variable equal to a random number between 1 and number of files you have, and then, in the section where you link to the css file, make it load a css file depending on that number.

<?php
$stylevar = rand(1, 5);
?>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style<?php echo $stylevar; ?>.css" />

That would be an easy way to do it if your styles were named style1.css, style2.css, etc. Or you can just make an if/else statement that if $stylevar is 1, you use echo or print to use whatever style you want.

[skilletsteve]

Thank you very much. This seems to work quite well.

[John]

I actually had to implement this into one of my designs for a customer, I found this which worked great.

Dynamic Drive DHTML Scripts- Style Sheet Switcher (v1.1)