Full page insertions without headers/footers

For some time I help WP in editing a journal for which LaTeX is used. The journal uses simple twocolum layout with multicolumn package. For headers/footers fancyhdr package is used. Recently I was asked to enable full page insertions with headers/footers suspended (probably for big advertisements).

The task is not as straightforward as it seems for a novice user of LaTeX. The following naive approach (\thispagestyle inside float environment) usually fails:

\begin{figure*}{p}
\thispagestyle{empty}
 ...
\end{figure}

LaTeX will supress headers/footers on the page at which \thispagestyle command was executed, not on the page at which the float was finally inserted. If the float is moved to the next page(s), headers/footers will be suspended on the wrong page.

Fortunately fancyhdr provides the \iffloatpage macro that can be used to customize headers and footers for pages which contain only floats. The use of \iffloatpage is simple:

\pagestyle{fancy}
%% supress rules
\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{\iffloatpage{0pt}{0.4pt}}
\renewcommand{\footrulewidth}{\iffloatpage{0pt}{0.4pt}}
%%
\fancyhead[RO]{\iffloatpage{}{\PM@HeaderFont \@shorttitle}}
\fancyhead[LE]{\iffloatpage{}{\PM@HeaderFont \@shortauthorlist}}
%%
\fancyfoot[RO]{\iffloatpage{}{\PM@FooterFont\thepage}}
\fancyfoot[LE]{\iffloatpage{}{\PM@FooterFont\thepage}}

%% then in the document body:

\begin{figure*}{p}
 %% --stuff to insert-- %%
\end{figure*}

Note: ``private'' (ie. defined in my class) commands \PM@HeaderFont/\PM@HeaderFont set the font for headers/footers and \@shorttitle/\@shortauthorlist insert some content.