[Forum] VB4 upgrades, custom themes, how do you do it?

[ducati1]

Hello VB junkies,

I have been a VB fan since it´s 3.something incarnation. Today I upgraded one of my forums to 4.2.0 and have experienced an old inconvenience that had bothered me since jumping from my first installation to my first upgrade in the vb3 era.

Everytime I upgrade a forum, all smileys and customizations were lost. Furthermore the style I had been using for quite a while was now deprecated, making my choice of a new skin inevitable. Therewith came confusion for the users, who were not used to seeing the forum with it´s now new skin. To be honest, everytime I upgraded in the past years, I was annoyed afterwards. Each time it took me and my users several weeks to get used to the new look and often times to the new usability of the upgraded forum.

My question is, how do you guys handle this? Do you wait for a new version to get a little dated? I personally don´t see the point of waiting after an upgrade has been released, because then the new bugfixes might be old again.

When uploading updated files from the /upload folder of new releases, how do you manage not to kill all your smilies and everything that used to be in the folders (and has not been replaced by new files)? I am using OSX 10.7 and Transmit as an ftp client.

Maybe someone of you guys has time to share their point of view on these things.

Benjamin

[Ace]

An upgrade (that isn't 3.x -> 4.x) shouldn't destroy all customisation and smilies, unless: 1) Your custom smilies had the same name as the ones you are uploading over the top and 2) You made your style changes to the MASTER style.

Changes made to the MASTER style are overwritten on upgrade, changes made to other styles are merged into the new style if possible.

[ducati1]

Hey Ace, thanks for the reply mate.

Whenever uploading sth like the /smilies directory from the new version on my HD to the server, it completely kills the folder on the server and replaces the contents with the ones from the /smilies directory on my HD. I thought it might be a Transmit issue that somehow I can´t figure out.

[Ace]

Ahh, good point. I have zero experience with MacOS.

I use SmartFTP on my PC, perhaps Transmit has a setting that tells it to delete the existing version before replacing?

[Matthew Gordon]

That's a pretty weird behavior. Try a different FTP client. I use FileZilla myself on Windows, but it also works for Mac OS X and Linux.

[Mermaid]

A decent FTP application will have a preference to either merge or replace folders. I choose merge folders, so existing files within with a different name, eg my own smilies, don't get deleted.

Any custom buttons such as status icons, that have the same name as the default ones, I keep a copy of locally in a folder, and then just upload that folder after the upgrade upload.

I agree it's annoying that so many template upgrades seem to break customisations.

[Matthew Gordon]

A decent FTP application will have a preference to either merge or replace folders. I choose merge folders, so existing files within with a different name, eg my own smilies, don't get deleted.

Any custom buttons such as status icons, that have the same name as the default ones, I keep a copy of locally in a folder, and then just upload that folder after the upgrade upload.

I agree it's annoying that so many template upgrades seem to break customisations.

You can always edit the status icon directory stylevar to point it to a different directory that won't get them overwritten. (It's the stylevar imgdir_statusicon.)