Updating to Vanilla 1, how to deal with own changes in the sourcecode?

Daniel_L

hello, i have a question about updating to Vanilla 1 when it's released... i have made several changes in the sourcecode to make the forum more the way i want it. but i guess there will occur problems when i update to vanilla 1. will all own changes be lost? is it better to copy the modified files and then rewrite the new sourcecode again if necessary? e.g. i have changed the function for the discussion-output a bit and changed some small things in the panel on the left (if you like to check it out: http://www.gerontologie-forum.de/). furthermore, i'd like to suggest to make more things optional. for instance, the legend on the left, as well as "Text-only mode" or the "Why do you want to join"-question at the registration are things which are - in my opinion - absolutely unnecessary, because very uncommon. that's it, keep up the great work! :-)

jsanders

any of the changes to the source would be lost. also, since 1.0 has a large number of very big changes, they may require significant changes to actually work. furthermore, a new installation of vanilla 1.0 without any extensions enabled is absolutely barren. the core functionality is just that, and very, very little else. and the "why do you want to join" question is called "applicant discovery" in vanilla 1.0, and is disabled by default, as are the rest of the extensions.

Mark

Hello Daniel,

All of those things you mentioned *are* now optional

Sadly, there is no way I am going to write an upgrader that will take into account xhtml customizations.

On the bright side, however, the new Vanilla has primitive templating, so you can pretty easily add your changes again with your own template.

Daniel_L

yes, since most of my changes apply to css-simplification - to get an better overview of the styles (and thus how to change the look) - and vanilla 1.0 seems to have much easier css, a new template should be made pretty fast. best thing is that all the extension-stuff i mentioned will be optional. :-) looking forward to the new release.

Bergamot

My plan is to make a copy of the forum, roll all my changes into it, and then replace the old one with the new one.

Oldmanpants

indeed... I have been careful to document most of my changes in a txt file, just listing what I changed in what file. within the file I commented around the area that i altered. In the language file, rather than just change the variables, I overwrote them at the end of the file so i don't have to search through the whole file for changes. the thing I'm worried most about is the stuff that I hacked together to handle user sessions in my own apps that I've been writing to work with Vanilla for one of my sites. As long as the user related cookies and correspoding db values are the same as in my current version on that site, then I'm cookin' ;)