Best practices for upgrading themes

kwilson

I'm working on my first Vanilla site and have my custom theme almost completed. Today I upgraded from 2.0.12 to 2.0.16 and was greeted with a fatal error in my sidebar, where the "Categories" box is usually located, referencing a line in vanilla/views/modules/categories.php within my theme directory.

Comparing the content of this file to the one in the main Vanilla core directory revealed some differences and allowed me to fix the problem, but that involved integrating all this embedded PHP into my own customized file, a tedious and time consuming process.

Given the amount of logic in Vanilla views, it seems that any upgrade could break parts of the site at any time. How are other people managing this on their own sites?

Tim

We're gradually reducing the logic in views. We went heavy on it initially to get things done, but now that we've got something working, refinements are on the cards. I believe quite a few module view changes have been committed to the Unstable branch recently and they'll make it into 2.1

kwilson

Glad to hear you're working on fixing this; I'll be careful upgrading until then. Thanks.

(Can we also get our config stored in the database instead of a writable PHP file?)