It happened to be so, that during design of my own theme based on Genesis, I run accross several Genesis theme upgrades from beta3 til beta5 release. Due to the fact, that there was several major changes in theme, as well as there is now stable version 2.1, I would like to ask for some additional info on upgrading process. Just copying new files to base theme get different results, including blank pages. As far as I could catch it, it is connected with core changes.

What could be the right process to cleanly upgrade self made subtheme?

Comments

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented

This is a really hard question to answer because it depends on what changes you have made, however I can at least give some pointers:

First thing is - do not try to blend the different versions, i.e. when you upgrade keep them separate, I was helping someone the other day who had tried to blend 2 different versions, this not a good idea and will ensure that it breaks.

Your subtheme should be totally separate, so just remove the old genesis folder from the sites/all/themes and put the new one in.

Ok, lets look at some really basic scenarios:

1. If you have not made any changes to the template files - copy over all your CSS and images to the new version, enable the new sub-theme and debug from there. Its going to take some work, how much depends on the extent of your theme.

2. You made changes to the templates. You will want to port those changes to the new templates. There are some changes to the new templates but not many, and are mainly in the page.tpl.php file, and mainly in the header (logo/site_name handling) and the addition of some css classes in other places. I think node, block, comment ect barely changed at all during the whole genesis2 dev period.

3. beta#5 ushered in a new layout engine, its an evolution of the original methods so you will need to look at that and make a small change to your layout id selector.

Few more things - 1) it wont hurt to stay on the older version, although they don't have Gpanels and a few other nice features, 2) it shouldn't be that much work, I just ported a version 1 theme and it was surprisingly easy and 3) I'm usually not that far away....

j2b’s picture

j2b commented

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately I allready tried merging new subthemes php and css files and discovered differences I wrote in my question. So in this case I had to be more collaborative before doing that :) I still got things to work by making small changes to new css and template files, but had a feeling that merged files have so many different unneeded settings and styles. Probably it would be better to make own tweaks in separate files, to allow upgrades in future and fetch them in .info file. (concerning css). About new features in b5 and stable version (2.1) - have not had a time to check them yet.

I was bothering on updates more for D6 update availability announcements, rather than new features in main theme due to timing issues on my project.

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented

Let me know if you run into anything you can't solve etc, always here to help :)

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)