Customizing and maintaining themes/plugins

fienen

So, I'm off and running with our new site, and most everything is how I want it. For the moment. Long term though, not as much. For instance, I hate using a plugin like CSSEdit to customize CSS, and Pocket to insert JS to manipulate my theme's layout (using the Bootstrap theme). I'm a big Wordpress guy, and I'm used to the idea of things like child themes and such to modify without altering a parent layout. From what I can tell, no such thing exists for Vanilla though.

This isn't so much a question, I'm mostly just curious how others handle their customizations. Ideally, I want to not mess with other people's code as much as possible. But I also don't like purely forking a resource, since then you have to backport any future updates they make. The same obviously goes for plugins that don't do things quite the way I want.

I'm gonna put this all in a git repo. That's happening no matter what. I'm just wondering what best practices you find work really well for Vanilla. I'm saying all this while still reviewing the dev docs and such, trying to learn the system.

hgtonight

Parent-Child themes are coming, but not here.

Modifying a theme is generally trivial to do so. Putting those deltas in a versioning system like git makes updates much less painful.

I have a git repo for my community site. Then I check out a bare copy to the serving directory. Publishing is just a git push away.

fienen

@hgtonight Is there anything cache-wise internally to Vanilla that you have to handle if you just update a theme directory from git? Or is it good enough to just let the files update and it's good to go?

hgtonight

If you are using a caching system, you can bust the cache by incrementing the version number of the theme. The addon's version gets appended to assets automatically.