Plone skin switching by inspecting the URL

Plone's CSS and main_template and friends are not easily adapted to very specific public interfaces. In such a case it is better to serve a skin called say Public to normal site visitors and Plone Default to administrators. I assume you know how to create these skins.

Now you need to know which skin to serve. Let http://www.foo.com be the URL for use by normal site visitors, and http://admin.foo.com be the URL for use by site administrators.

We are going to use an External Method and a Set Access Rule to accomplish this.

In your product's Extension directory create a file called selectSkin.py

# Contents of selectSkin.py
def run(self):
    request = self.REQUEST
    if request.get('URL').startswith('http://admin'):
        self.portal_url.getPortalObject().changeSkin('Plone Default')
   else:
        self.portal_url.getPortalObject().changeSkin('Public')

from Products.SiteAccess.AccessRule import manage_addAccessRule
if not hasattr(self, 'selectSkin'):
        em = self.manage_addProduct['ExternalMethod']
        em.manage_addExternalMethod('selectSkin', 'selectSkin', 'MyProduct.selectSkin', 'run')
        manage_addAccessRule(self, 'selectSkin')