Oxygen‘s biggest strength – namely disabling the active theme is also its biggest weakness.
Oxygen has truly one and only one limitation technically speaking – not being able to override templates of other plugins because there is no working active theme.
Thankfully some popular plugin developers offer a way (a filter hook) to change the location at which their plugin’s templates can be overridden which means those templates can be copied to a functionality plugin and modified as needed.
Below are links to tutorials/resources for some of them:
- WooCommerce (same process for WP Job Manager as well, just the hook name changes)
- Easy Digital Downloads
- Restrict Content Pro
- Tutor LMS (premium tutorial)
- AffiliateWP (premium tutorial)
- The Events Calendar (premium tutorial)
If you come across a plugin you want to override the templates of, check its documentation for a filter to change the template overrides location or contact the plugin author.
Below is a sample email template that you could modify and send to the plugin developer requesting him/them to provide a filter using which it will be possible to override plugin’s templates from within a custom functionality plugin:
Hello,
I would like to override your plugin’s templates by following < https://strongtestimonials.com/docs/customizations/custom-templates/initial-steps/ > (replace this with the corresponding URL from the plugin documentation).
I use Oxygen which disables themes.
I am wondering if there is a filter to change the plugin template override path so I can override your plugin’s templates from within a custom functionality plugin?
Others like WooCommerce (woocommerce_locate_template), EDD (edd_template_paths) and RCP (rcp_template_stack) provide them.
Examples:
https://wpdevdesign.com/how-to-override-woocommerce-templates-using-a-custom-functionality-plugin/
https://github.com/wplit/Oxygen-EDD-Support/blob/master/plugin.php
https://github.com/wplit/Oxygen-RCP-Support/blob/master/plugin.php
Thanks for your help.