06 November 2010, 11:30

Hi Maharians,

I've got a question regarding Mahara's upgrade policy on custom themes ;)

Every time I update my installation, I've to spent several hours readjusting themes etc. because I don't know if you guys changed some code in the templates directory. Is there an easy way to check if any alterations have been made to the theme files? It would really save some time if I could just copy & paste my custom theme after I've upgraded my installation.

Cheers

Alex

07 November 2010, 15:58

Hi Alex,

This is always a problem when your custom theme overrides templates.  There is absolutely no way we can keep templates the same between major versions of Mahara and still implement the new features we need.

I know this is no consolation, but we do have the same problems ourselves for every new major release with our own custom themes (like the mahara.org theme).  Ideally you only override templates when absolutely necessary, and try to do as much as you can in the css.  I think we have it down to about 6 overridden templates in the mahara.org theme now, so it doesn't take too long to check through those.

All I can suggest, when upgrading from version x to version y, is to first generate a list of all templates you override (templates that are in your custom theme and also in the raw theme in version x), and then do a diff from version x to version y of those templates in the raw theme.  This isn't super-painful using the right combination of unix commands like find, grep, sed, xargs, diff, etc.  Then if there are changes in the raw version of a template, you'll need to make sure you adjust your custom version of that template to reflect those changes.

13 November 2010, 7:00

Hi Richard,

thx for this post. This time I made some notes which templates I've overwritten.

Next update shut be more or less painless ;)