vBulletin Manual - Checking for Updated Templates

If you have closed your forums for the upgrade you can now open them, or you can wait until you have gone through the next two steps checking for updated templates and phrases.

When a new version of vBulletin is released, it is common for some of the default templates to have been updated to accommodate new features or fix bugs.

If you have not customized any of your templates, this need not concern you, but if you have customized some of the default templates there are a few steps you will need to follow after you have finished running all the appropriate upgrade scripts.

Note:

When running vBulletin upgrade scripts, one of the final steps imports the newest version of the default style.

Any templates that you have not customized will automatically be updated to use the newest versions.

However, any templates that you have customized will not be altered or overwritten by importing the latest style, hence the need for the following steps.

Firstly, you should visit the Styles & Templates > Find Updated Templates page to find out which (if any) of your customized templates may have updated default versions.

If you find that some of your customized templates do have updated default versions, you have three choices. You can either

Do nothing and hope that your customized templates will still work properly with the new vBulletin version. This is often not a problem, but sometimes a variable may have been renamed or else some other change may have been made that will render your customized template dysfunctional.
Click the [Revert] link for each template, removing your customizations to ensure that your templates are fully compatible with the new vBulletin version.
Click on the [Edit Template] link for each template, and compare the contents of your customized template with the version available by clicking the [View Original] in order to manually update your customized templates to reflect the changes made in the default templates.

On the release of a new vBulletin version, the release announcement posted in the Announcements Forum at vBulletin.com will usually contain a list of updated templates.

This list will often tell you whether or not the changes made to each template were purely cosmetic, in which case you will have no need to perform the steps above for that template, or if the changes require you to revert or manually edit your customized templates to maintain full working order.

Aldarow	19th Sep 2005, 02:23pm
[View Original] is actually called [Show Default]. To compare between the templates you can use, for instance, the "Compare Files" tool of TextPad software - just copy and paste both versions of the template (yours and the newer one) into two different text files and compare them.
Llama	10th Oct 2005, 07:53pm
For comparing custom templates with original (reverted) templates you can also use WinMerge ( http://winmerge.sourceforge.net/ ) which is a easy to understand and usable tool for file<->file / content<->content comparison
PocketSizeSun	09th Dec 2005, 06:38am
To compare templates, you can use the compare button in the admin control panel (3.5.2 at least), that's way easier than using an external software )