The Another Multi-Brand Global Styles

Define Brands — URL match rules with per-Brand global-style overrides and content variables — on a single WordPress installation serving multiple domains and/or path sections.

• Requires: WordPress 6.9+, PHP 8.3+
• License: GPL-2.0-or-later
• Homepage: https://theanother.org/plugin/multi-brand-global-styles/

For the WordPress.org listing, see readme.txt. For development setup, architecture, testing, and how to contribute, see CONTRIBUTORS.md.

What it does

A Brand bundles the following and applies them wherever its URL rules match the incoming request — without touching the theme's theme.json or creating a child theme:

• URL match rules — whole domains (auctionbill.com, beta.auctionbill.com) or path sections of one or more sites (site.com/farm/*, site2.com/farm/*). Most-specific rule wins: host+path beats host-only, longer path prefix beats shorter, and prefixes match on path-segment boundaries.
• Global style overrides — each Brand carries its own theme.json-shaped styles (colors, typography, spacing, per-element and per-block), merged over the active theme at render time via the wp_theme_json_data_user filter.
• Content variables — tokens like %%brand.name%% in post content, template parts, widgets, or menus are substituted with the matched Brand's values. Two passes cover this: the rendered HTML, and a block's attributes before its render callback runs — the latter is what makes a token usable in a navigation link's URL, which core escapes with esc_url() on the way out. Tokens stay literal in the admin and in the editor's block previews, so authors edit the token rather than one Brand's resolved value.
• Brand identity — an optional per-Brand logo, site title, tagline, and favicon.
• Image replacements — swap any image for a per-Brand replacement, from a central meta box on the Brand or from the Image block's inspector panel.
• Editor preview — a block-editor Brand preview sidebar (canvas image/identity swap) plus a frontend preview link for admins.

An optional default Brand acts as the fallback for requests that match no rule. This is not WP Multisite and not separate installs — it's one install, one database, many Brands.

Only users with the edit_theme_options capability (admins/theme editors) can create or edit Brands.

Public API

• mbgs_request_home_url( mixed $url ): mixed (function) — server-side code that builds URLs outside the rendered page (emails, API payloads) can ask for the home URL as seen from the domain being browsed:

  $origin = function_exists( 'mbgs_request_home_url' )
      ? mbgs_request_home_url( home_url() )
      : home_url();

  The URL's scheme and host are swapped to the browsed domain (path, query and fragment preserved) when all of the following hold:

  • the request's Host+path explicitly matched a configured Brand URL rule — the default-Brand fallback and the admin preview override never trigger a swap;
  • that Brand has URL rewrite enabled;
  • the passed URL's host is the site's own home/siteurl host. This is a home-URL bridge, not a general URL rewriter — pass it anything else (a CDN asset, an external callback) and you get it back untouched.

  The scheme honors the Brand's force-https setting and the current request, but is never downgraded below the passed URL's own: an https:// home URL always comes back https://. In every other case — no rule match, rewrite off, a non-home URL, a non-string value — the passed value is returned unchanged (and with this plugin inactive the function does not exist, hence the function_exists() guard). The substituted authority derives from the client-supplied Host header; it is only ever a host that explicitly matched a configured Brand URL rule, but consumers must still treat it as untrusted for anything beyond link/branding selection.

• mbgs_request_home_url (filter) — extension point applied inside the function to its computed result: apply_filters( 'mbgs_request_home_url', $brand_aware, $original ). Third-party code can add_filter here to override the Brand-aware value; the substitution itself has already happened (or been declined) by the time it runs. Consumers wanting the value call the function above — they do not apply this filter themselves.

Contributing

Contributor guidelines, the code architecture, and all development/testing commands live in CONTRIBUTORS.md. Release history is in CHANGELOG.md.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html.