Monday 21 November 2005 2:56:22 pm

Hi risto, this is a pretty broad question, one that could have a number of right answers, it really depends on how different the designs need to be and how you want to access them.

There are a couple of thing you could try, the first case would be for minor changes, for example if you are only changing colours or background images etc. and you don't need to change the actual structure of the page (XHTML) the you could try a conditional stylesheet switcher, similar to the way you change your footer.

If you need to make more complete changes then you could set some overrides in override.ini.append.php that will use different templates for each section.

Using you example from above you could create 3 new directories inside "/design/[site]/override/templates - design_1, design_2, design_3". then create your templates for each design inside them.

Then you will need to create your overrides.

[design_01]
Source=pagelayout.tpl
MatchFile=design_01/pagelayout.tpl
Subdir=templates
Match[section]=1 (the id of your section)

[design_02]
Source=pagelayout.tpl
MatchFile=design_02/pagelayout.tpl
Subdir=templates
Match[section]=2 (the id of your section)

[design_03]
Source=pagelayout.tpl
MatchFile=design_03/pagelayout.tpl
Subdir=templates
Match[section]=3 (the id of your section)

(Obviously change them as needed)

From here create as many templates and overrides as you need.

*Disclaimer, I have never used the override system to this extent so I don't know if there are any pitfalls with this method, I think it should be ok ;).

Or you could choose to use siteaccess, multiple design folders and multiple settings/siteaccess folders etc, look here if this is more what your after:
http://ez.no/doc/ez_publish/technical_manual/3_6/concepts_and_basics/configuration/site_management

Cheers!

Pardon me while I burst into flames...