Flexile 1.1.5.1

[Itworx4me]

I am really PISSED. I upgraded this style and it over wrote some of my custom templates that I have worked very hard to customize. What a bunch of CHIT....I really hate this style at the moment!!!!!

If you have custom templates DON"T UPGRADE this style.......

 

[x4rl]

I am really PISSED. I upgraded this style and it over wrote some of my custom templates that I have worked very hard to customize. What a bunch of CHIT....I really hate this style at the moment!!!!!

If you have custom templates DON"T UPGRADE this style.......

Rule one....
Allways and allways Backup..

 

[Peggy]

I am really PISSED. I upgraded this style and it over wrote some of my custom templates that I have worked very hard to customize. What a bunch of CHIT....I really hate this style at the moment!!!!!

If you have custom templates DON"T UPGRADE this style.......

I have custom templates, and I upgraded. Went fine. But then, I keep a list of the edits, so that I can add them back in.

 

[cmeinck]

I am really PISSED. I upgraded this style and it over wrote some of my custom templates that I have worked very hard to customize. What a bunch of CHIT....I really hate this style at the moment!!!!!

If you have custom templates DON"T UPGRADE this style.......

I had a ton of customizations in a 'child' template of Flexile. I overwrote the main Flexile (RC3) to 1.0. Not a single problem. The best way to do edits is the following:

1. Install a fresh copy of Flexile
2. Create a child style under Flexile
3. Make the 'child' style your default.
4. Make all edits in the 'child' style.
5. When a new release comes out, just overwrite "Flexile", leaving the 'child' style alone.

I was amazed at how smooth it went.

 

[Ryan Kent]

Itworx4me, I am experiencing the exact same issues as you, so I feel your pain. Bottom line, we didn't update our site correctly. cmeinck's post above is correct, as Erik has shared earlier in this thread. It's our mistake.

Fortunately I did back up my site before upgrading. That basic step should always be done. I am working on restoring my site to another instance, and then I'll copy over the deleted templates. It's not the style's fault nor the style maker's fault. We were well advised, even if we didn't fully understand the information at the time.

 

[Itworx4me]

Looking back on it....it was my fault for not looking at the install files better. I have now setup the style as a child. I re-edited all my custom templates. Won't let this happen again....

 

[Peggy]

Think I'm going to do this too.

 

[cmeinck]

Itworx4me, I am experiencing the exact same issues as you, so I feel your pain. Bottom line, we didn't update our site correctly. cmeinck's post above is correct, as Erik has shared earlier in this thread. It's our mistake.

Fortunately I did back up my site before upgrading. That basic step should always be done. I am working on restoring my site to another instance, and then I'll copy over the deleted templates. It's not the style's fault nor the style maker's fault. We were well advised, even if we didn't fully understand the information at the time.

Looking back on it....it was my fault for not looking at the install files better. I have now setup the style as a child. I re-edited all my custom templates. Won't let this happen again....

Guys, I should say that I was in the same boat and did the same thing a few times. I figured that once 1.0 was coming, I'd try Erik's method. I nuked everything when I moved to RC3. Before that, I was hanging on to beta 6, knowing that I'd have to nuke my custom edits.

Having done a number of vB updates in my lifetime, I'm astonished at how easy it is to update XF using this method. Good luck.

 

[Erik]

I've a problem with the IE 9.0 RC1 (I know it's RC state but I think I'll report it anyway):
The corners aren't displayed correctly. It occourse here if I have a div .secondaryContent paired with .avatarHeap without an ID as attribute/param.
As soon as I add an ID attribute, the display is correct as in example Opera.

Noted, although I don't currently have IE 9 installed and I'm not going to try and address it until IE 9 is stable.

And for those having upgrade problems, as many have mentioned it's not my fault. It sucks if you lost your custom templates or edits but it's not because of anything I did. Again, this is another reason why I recommend the method of upgrading that I do (put into easy steps in cmeinck's post above).

 

[Peggy]

I had a ton of customizations in a 'child' template of Flexile. I overwrote the main Flexile (RC3) to 1.0. Not a single problem. The best way to do edits is the following:

1. Install a fresh copy of Flexile
2. Create a child style under Flexile
3. Make the 'child' style your default.
4. Make all edits in the 'child' style.
5. When a new release comes out, just overwrite "Flexile", leaving the 'child' style alone.

I was amazed at how smooth it went.

So how would I go about this when I already have Flexile installed and customized?

Would I install a fresh copy of Flexile as a child of the xenforo default (which is what my current copy of Flexile is now), then make my current copy of Flexile a child of the new Flexile?

Or should I start all over, since my forum isn't live yet?

Obviously, I'm confused.

 

[Erik]

then make my current copy of Flexile a child of the new Flexile?

Due to the way the templating system works, this isn't really possible, so I think your best bet is to copy down all of your customizations and then start over, yes.

 

[Peggy]

Due to the way the templating system works, this isn't really possible, so I think your best bet is to copy down all of your customizations and then start over, yes.

ok I can do that. Thanks Erik.

 

[Peggy]

Ok just to be clear (which I never am anyway) :

I'm going to do a fresh install of Flexile as a child of the xf default.
Then I'm going to import Flexile again as a child of Flexile? (I will rename this Blue)


Do I have this right??

 

[Erik]

Ok just to be clear (which I never am anyway) :

I'm going to do a fresh install of Flexile as a child of the xf default.
Then I'm going to import Flexile again as a child of Flexile? (I will rename this Blue)


Do I have this right??

No, you don't want to import Flexile again as a child style, just click the "Create New Style" button and make the new (essentially "blank") style a child of Flexile. Then make your customizations in that style.

 

[Peggy]

No, you don't want to import Flexile again as a child style, just click the "Create New Style" button and make the new (essentially "blank") style a child of Flexile. Then make your customizations in that style.

Did it and got it.

Thanks Erik for your patience.

 

[Peggy]

Another question tho (trying to wrap my head around this).

Didn't you say to do the customizations to the child style of Flexile, and when Flexile gets updated, those customizations would still be there?
But if it is a child of Flexile, why wouldn't I lose those customizations?

 

[Erik]

Didn't you say to do the customizations to the child style of Flexile, and when Flexile gets updated, those customizations would still be there?
But if it is a child of Flexile, why wouldn't I lose those customizations?

Basically, the way the style system works is that child styles define what is changed relative to the parent style, and then they inherit the rest of the parent style that is not explicitly defined for the child style. This applies to both templates and Style Properties.

So when you make customizations to the the child style and then the parent Flexile style is updated (overwritten), the child style will keep the changed templates and style properties while still inheriting the rest from Flexile, and thus it inherits the new, updated versions of the templates.

Does that make sense?

 

[Peggy]

Basically, the way the style system works is that child styles define what is changed relative to the parent style, and then they inherit the rest of the parent style that is not explicitly defined for the child style. This applies to both templates and Style Properties.

So when you make customizations to the the child style and then the parent Flexile style is updated (overwritten), the child style will keep the changed templates and style properties while still inheriting the rest from Flexile, and thus it inherits the new, updated versions of the templates.

Does that make sense?

Not a bit, but it's wonderful anyway! LOL
Thanks again Erik.

 

[Ryan Kent]

One follow up question please while you fine people are educating us noobs

Just for example purposes, let's assume

- Flexile has 20 templates. My Flexile-Blue child would also have 20 templates.
- I have modified all 20 templates in the child style (not realistic, but I just want to use this example)
- You put out Flexile 1.1 in which you have modified 10 of the 20 templates

So when I install the 1.1 update, 10 of my templates will automatically inherit their updates? and the other 10 will remain untouched? i.e. I wont have those updates for my style?

What I am trying to understand is let's say I have the following footer.css template:

.footer .pageContent
{
@property "footer";
font-size: 12px;
color: @textCtrlText;
overflow: hidden;
zoom: 1;
}

If I change the font size to 14px in the child style, and then I update the parent, will the rest of the template update and just leave the font-size? or will that template remain completely in tact because of that one modification?

 

[Erik]

That's where things get tricky, and in an attempt to avoid confusing everybody even more, I left that detail out of my explanation. The issue here is that XenForo only works on the template level. It doesn't have the ability to break down a template and find out which specific blocks of CSS have changed or which haven't. It only knows if the entire template has been modified or not.

So in your footer.css example, even if you just modify one line of CSS, XenForo would consider that template modified and it would not update if you updated the parent. It would remain completely intact because of that one modification.

So, in your first hypothetical scenario in which all 20 templates are modified, when you install/update the parent Flexile template, not a single template would actually be updated in the child style, because they had all been modified, and the modified templates in the child style take precedence over the templates in the parent style.

So, in effect, updating the parent Flexile style in that situation would do nothing. This is where you can theoretically run into problems if you've customized Flexile heavily. Because any templates that you've modified in the child style will have priority over their parent counterparts and thus will not be updated when you overwrite the parent Flexile style, it's possible (and probably even likely) that you won't get some of the changes or updates that I've made in the new version. This could in theory lead to hard-to-diagnose style issues if there are missing template hooks, inconsistencies, etc.

There's really no way around this other than to put your all your CSS edits/overrides in EXTRA.css and leave the rest of the CSS templates untouched, so that the child style will inherit them from the parent style and thus will inherit any updates too. However, this doesn't help for HTML templates. In those cases if something goes awry you may just have to revert the template and start clean, or manually transfer the updates yourself to your customized versions (this is what I have to do each time I update Flexile or Flexile Dark - it's about an hour long process, although it depends on how many templates differ between each version of XenForo).

As I said in my brief post about this on page 10 of this thread, "such is the life of customizing themes."