Description of the need
I recently ran into a use case for forcing the site to use the admin theme for all "Book" pages. I thought this would be easier than it actually is. My initial impulse was to make this conditional on content type, that is that one could specificy which theme to use for a specific content type.
After discussing this with others, we are thinking that it might be better to make this option available on a per layout basis. We could add an option to layouts that allows a person to select a different enabled theme for any specific layout. This would allow the site admin to create a Content Type specific layout that uses another theme, but they would also have access to all the other visibility conditions, including ROLE or specific individual paths.
See this forum discussion: https://forum.backdropcms.org/forum/using-admin-theme-book-pages
Proposed solution
Add a checkbox to the configure page for individual layouts: [ ] Use a custom theme for this layout
If this checkbox is checked, one could then select from a drop down list of enabled themes to choose an alternative theme for that layout.
Alternatives that have been considered
This could be a contrib module, but I think this MIGHT also be reasonable new feature in core. Existing contrib modules that do something related are:
Page Theme https://github.com/backdrop-contrib/page_theme
Content Theme https://github.com/backdrop-contrib/content_theme
Additional information
https://forum.backdropcms.org/forum/using-admin-theme-book-pages
Draft of feature description for Press Release (1 paragraph at most)
Backdrop now includes the ability to use different themes for specific layouts. Site admins will be able to choose any enabled theme to be used when viewing pages with a specific layout.
Recent comments
I'm really hoping to make this simple change on new content types: https://github.com/backdrop/backdrop-issues/issues/7080 Let's disable the ""Display author and date information" by...
February 26th, 2026 - Weekly Meetings
For our DEV meeting: an older bug needs (and could have) a fix. Issue #5729 - Views: Search Filter: On Empty Input "Show None" option Shows All There are 2 pull requests, but one...
February 26th, 2026 - Weekly Meetings
Ruby Text can be a bit of a hassle to edit... Yes, I can imagine that. No idea, how an editor dialog (or whatever) for easier editing of those should look like - in terms of...
Specific tags to work in CKEditor 5