Mixing and mashing website themes

Abstract

WordPress offers users a wide choice of themes defining the structure, functionality, layout and presentation of a website together with its content types. These themes are shared by the WordPress community, enabling users to benefit from the skills of others. However, it is not possible to mix themes, so users often have to choose from a set of themes that only partially meet their requirements. We have developed a theme editor that allows users to combine both static and dynamic elements of existing themes using simple drag-and-drop operations. These elements are adapted to reflect the content and structure of the website under construction so that there is no distinction between designtime and run-time. We discuss in detail technical challenges along with our solutions for developing such an editor and integrating it into the WordPress platform. Further, we describe how the solutions could be generalised to other modern content management systems.