Building a Custom Theme - Where?

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5/21/2009 1:08:03 PM
michael.jew
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Building a Custom Theme - Where?

In a former post Joe said, "Its best to keep all customizations in your own external proejcts..."

QUESTION: If a team were doing active development on a new Theme/Skin would you also recommend creating a new project?  Or do you recommend development happening in /Data/Sites/1/skins -or perhaps even- /Data/skins?

The reason I ask is becauase in other documetnation you've written...

When the setup page runs and it creates the first site, all the skin files are copied from
/Data/skins
to
/Data/Sites/[SiteID]/skins

So typically it will copy them from /Data/skins to /Data/Sites/1/skins. It will only do this if the /Data/Sites/1/skins folder does not exist.

Thus, it seems that the existing mojo model is to not continually overwrite the /Data/Sites/1/skins directory.  Thus, it likely doesn't make sense to also setup a post-build event to copy a theme from a custom project into /Data/Sites/1/skins for every build.  Thoughts?

 

thank you,

Michael

 

5/21/2009 2:08:11 PM
Joe Audette
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Re: Building a Custom Theme - Where?

Hi Michael,

Part of the confusion with the documentation about this is because I used to keep a copy of the skins in svn and in release packages at /Data/Sites/1/skins in addition to the copy at /Data/skins.

Over time this became too large and cumbersome maintaining the files in both places though it did make the release packages a little less problem prone since this copying of files at setup occasionally hangs up or times out on cheap hosting.

So now I would say just develop your skin in place at /Data/Sites/[SiteID]/skins/[skinname]

If you can put that folder under your own source control great, if not then periodically copy it to a folder wwhere you can keep it in source control.

So yes, its not currently a risk that existing skins will be overwritten by upgrading, though at one time I did warn about that because we were including skins ay /Data/Sites/1/skins in the packages.

Best,

Joe

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