Custom theme settings are something that are currently possible, but don't work terribly well in PHPTemplate. Although it's not documented, you can add a phptemplate_settings() function to your theme's template.php and add custom settings. BUT, you can't edit settings of non-active themes because you would get function re-declaration errors if you were to try including both the active and non-active theme's template.php file. So a separate file is really needed to hold each theme's settings. I believe the best solution to this issue is to: 1. Change system_theme_settings() to allow both engine-specific and theme-specific settings for any theme. Currently, if the theme is based on an engine, system_theme_settings() will only add engine-specific settings. 2. Add phptemplate_settings() to the PHPTemplate engine and, using the $key passed by system_theme_settings(), look in the $key theme's directory and include and return the contents of a settings.php file. I've made a patch for Drupal 6. If you want to review, contribute, (or commit :-D ), take a look at the issue, patch and example settings.php file here: http://drupal.org/node/57676 - John (JohnAlbin) BTW, if you want a solution to this issue for Drupal 5, see my Theme Settings API module at http://drupal.org/project/themesettings