With CMS Commander you can easily install a WordPress theme to multiple websites in less than a minute. You can also activate, deactivate, delete and update themes on all your websites at the same time. To do so head to the “Themes” page in your account’s main navigation.

On the CMS Commander “Themes” page you can remotely manage themes on all your websites at the same time. That includes activating and deactivating used themes , installing new themes on several sites and updating all themes at the same time. The “Themes” page works very similar to the bulk plugin management features of the “Plugins” page.

Manage WordPress Themes

The “Themes” page is split into two tabs which you can choose at the top of the page. On the first “Manage Themes” tab you can review, delete and activate themes on your websites as well as copy themes from one site to all others.

When first visiting the page you will see a list of installed themes loaded from your default site set in CMS Commander. You can change the default site on your “Dashboard” page. To load a list of themes from any other of your blogs click on the “Load Content” button next to its URL in the sitelist to the right of the screen.

The theme active on the blog is marked with a blue background. Next to each other theme you can find an “Activate” link. Clicking it makes this theme the active one on the blog the theme list was loaded from.

Next to the “Activate” link there is a “Bulk Actions” link. Click it to open up a choice of bulk actions you can perform with this theme on any number of your blogs. The choices are:

• Activate the theme on multiple blogs simultaneously.
• Copy the theme and install it on any number of other blogs.

To perform a bulk action for a theme on multiple of your blogs:

1. Click on “Bulk Actions” next to the theme of your choice.
2. Select the blogs you want to affect in the sitelist to the right by checking the box next to their name. Or check “All Websites” to affect all your blogs.
3. Click on the bulk action link of your choice.

There is also the possibility to perform actions for multiple themes on multiple sites. To do that you need to use the dropdown field that reads “Bulk Actions” right above the table listing your installed themes. The process is almost the same: Select the action of your choice in the dropdown box, check the sites you want to perform the action on as well as the themes and then press the “Apply” button.

Updating All WordPress Themes

The feature to update all WordPress themes on your blogs has been moved to the “Dashboard” page. There you can update WordPress themes as well as plugins and WordPress itself on all your websites with only a few clicks. See the article “Using the Dashboard” for details.

Activating A WordPress Theme On Multiple Weblogs

To activate a WordPress theme first choose all the sites you want to make the new theme active on by checking the box next to them in the list. After that click on “Bulk Actions” next to the theme of your choice and then press “Activate Theme on Selected Sites”.

Installing New WordPress Themes

To bulk install WordPress themes to your sites navigate to the “Install Theme (WordPress)” tab. Once there CMS Commander offers you four choices where to install the new WP theme from:

• From Favourites: Select and install themes from the favourites you have set in CMS Commander. Once you have created a list of favourites this is the quickest and easiest way to install themes. I would recommend you to save all the themes you regularly use as favourites, so that you can easily bulk install them all on a new WordPress website you set up.
  To add a theme as favourite go to the “From WordPress Theme Directory” choice, search the directory for the themes of your choice and click the “Add to Favourites” link in the results.
• From WordPress Theme Directory: Search the thousands of themes listed in the official WordPress theme directory for any keyword. After submitting the search form the results are displayed in a table below and you have the choice to add a theme as favourite (see above) or install it on the current website. To install several of the themes in the result simply select their checkboxes, then select the sites of your choice in the “Your Sites” list and click “Install on selected Sites” at the bottom of the page to install the theme on all of them.
• From URL: For themes not listed in the WP theme directory, i.e. premium themes , you can provide a web address (URL) to the themes .zip file to install it on your websites. After entering the URL simply select the sites you want to install the theme on from the “Your Sites” list and click the “Install on selected Sites” button.
• From Your Computer: This option lets you select a theme .zip file that you have saved locally to your computer. After selecting the file it will get uploaded and you can install the theme to any number of your WordPress weblogs simultaneously.

For each of the four choices there are two additional settings: “Activate Installed Themes” tells CMS Commander to immediately activate the new theme on your blog after installation while “Overwrite Existing” means that a folder of the same name (could be an old version for example) would get overwritten with the theme you chose to install now.

Once you have selected your theme file location all you need to do is choose some or all of your websites from the “Your Sites” list to the right and press the “Install Theme” button. The theme file will then get bulk installed to all selected WordPress weblogs immediatelly.

Search results from the WP theme directory. One of the supported sources for theme installation to multiple weblogs with CMS Commander.