Stylesheets A’ Plenty

I started by first creating 13 different stylesheets. The first one I created was a base stylesheet containing the basic structure of site. The other stylesheets containing color changes to the header, headings, and link colors, were created for every month. I saved each of the monthly stylesheets by month number, so September’s stylesheet was saved as 9.css, June’s was 6.css and December’s was 12.css. You can take a look through the archived entries on this site to see the various styling for each month.

Taking Advantage of WordPress Conditional Tags

WordPress conditional tags are an easy way to tell WordPress to alter various elements within your theme depending on certain conditions. Most early themes for WordPress take advantage of conditional tags to display different content in the sidebar of a page depending on your current location on the site. In order to keep the current month’s look on the front page of my site, but have the individual entries maintain the look of the month it was written I set up a conditional that said if the page is_single() then display the stylesheet of the month it was published. If we are not on a single entry page then display the current month’s stylesheet. Here’s what it looks like:

< ?php if (is_single() ) { ?>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://sitename.com/<?php the_time('n'); ?>.css" />
< ?php } else { ?>
<link rel="stylesheet” type="text/css" href="http://sitename.com/<?php echo date('n'); ?>.css" />
< ?php } ?>


PHP

Notice the small bit of PHP within the conditional we set up – <?php echo date('n'); ?>? I replaced the name of the imported CSS file with a short snippet of PHP, which in turn generates a numerical value of one through twelve depending on the month, and appends the *.css file extension. This is why I saved my monthly stylesheets by month number. You can read more about the PHP Date/Time functions and decide what format is best for you.

Options

If you are not using WordPress you can still easily accomplish the same switching of stylesheets with some simple javascript or server side methods. Once you are familiar with some the options of the PHP Date/Time functions you can experiment with changing the look of your site at any interval you like.