vBulletin 4.1.10 "Remove Orphan Stylevars" Tool

[Sebastiano Vassellatti]

In vBulletin 4.1.10, we added a new "Remove Orphan Stylevars" tool (VBIV-8845) to clean up any orphan or deprecated stylevar data that exists on your installations. The new tool is located at:

Admin CP -> Maintenance -> General Update Tools -> Remove Orphan Stylevars (at the bottom of the list)

To ensure your stylevar list is always clean from any deprecated stylevar, it is recommended that you run this tool after each upgrade, especially after the 4.1.10 upgrade: there were 109 stylevars removed in 4.1.10 over 4.1.9, thus you will have 109 deprecated stylevars after upgrading to 4.1.10, and if you also went through all previous vB4 versions, you've most likely cumulated over 200 deprecated stylevars.

Running the tool will one-click remove:

• Any deprecated vBulletin default stylevar - These can exist only on upgraded forums. If a stylevar existed as default in the master style of a previous vBulletin version, and you upgrade to a newer version where the stylevar no longer exist in the master style, it won't be "hard-removed" from your board by the upgrade script, because there is the possibility that it is used in your custom styles or in custom CSS you may have added, so "hard-removing" it would most likely do more harm than good.
• Any oprhan custom product stylevar - If a custom product had stylevars associated with it, the stylevars were not being removed upon product uninstall. This was an issue resolved in 4.1.10, however the stylevars of products removed before upgrading to 4.1.10 would still be there.
• Any orphan custom style stylevar value - This means, any stylevar that exists only in custom styles but not in the master style. These are oprhan data that still exist in your database but that cannot be viewed/edited anywhere. A typical situation that could create these is importing a style that was made for a different vB version than the one you're using: if a stylevar that was customized existed only in that version, it will create an orphan stylevar record when you import the custom style.

The phrases associated to any stylevar that this tool removes will be removed as well.
Before running the tool, ensure you don't actually need anymore any of the orphan or deprecated stylevars, and that custom CSS you may have added is not referencing any of them.

[Sebastiano Vassellatti]

If a stylevar is used, the syntax will be like: {vb:stylevar xxx} (with xxx being the stylevar names).

[The Vegan Forum]

Thanks, I'll have a lok at that soon!

"Mapping" means that the value of the old stylevar is automatically set as value of the new, replacement stylevar"

...and this:

What needs to be checked before running the Remove Orphan Stylevars tool is that you don't have any customized CSS template that is not up-to-date, i.e. possibly still referencing stylevars that have been removed.

still sounds like a contradiction, sort of - but I guess it has to do with this: "a few stylevars have been removed in favour of more global stylevars that already existed, but we don't map anything in case the replacement stylevar existed already as that could overwrite a previously made customization."

[Sebastiano Vassellatti]

That isn't a contradiction, we map the stylevar values to the new stylevars, the templates are unrelated. We can't do anything for the templates, other than the normal template merge that tries to merge the changes into your customized templates.