XF 2.1 Public Navigation changed during upgrade

[Wildcat Media]

I am working on an upgrade project, and had our new Public Navigation menus all set up and rearranged as needed. I felt there needed to be some clarity as to what the various top (parent) choices offered, and made many changes by either deleting or moving items to new top navigation menus.

When I ran our upgrade to 2.1.9 last week, many of the items I had rearranged were either moved back to their original parent entries or in one instance, one of my custom navigation items (pointing to a group of page nodes) was deleted entirely. Navigation entries for an add-on remained where I had put them (it was the Ignore More add-on that lets users ignore forums and threads).

Just wanted to point this out.

 

[Chris D]

I strongly suspect you made the changes with development mode enabled. Otherwise the navigation entries would have persisted.

 

[Wildcat Media]

You're right, I do have it enabled since I'm working on several add-ons for our upcoming upgrade. I didn't realize development mode changed how it functioned.

 

[Ozzy47]

Development mode don’t change how it functions, it just overwrites the default setup. So when you upgrade, it overwrites the default setup again.

 

[Chris D]

Actually, it kind of does change how it functions, in this case.

If development mode is disabled and the entry is assigned to an add-on we mark it as "customized" and therefore your changes should persist across upgrades.

A similar concept is seen with templates and languages in the master style.

 

[Ozzy47]

Interesting, never knew that. Thanks for the explanation.

 

[Wildcat Media]

That is good to know. Thankfully all template modifications I have done (there are a few dozen) are safely tied to my own custom add-ons, ready to export and put to use in the "live" forum once XF 2.1.9 is installed.

Thankfully it wasn't critical in our "testing" forum, but on our live forum, I likely won't ever be using development mode and I'll make a point to be sure the navigation entries are tied to an add-on. (Am I safe in using "XenForo" as the add-on, or should I tie it to one of my own?)

Thanks to the ability to export the add-ons, and all the style modifications I have made, the coming upgrade will be really efficient to perform. It saves me so much work! I've only been exploring the development side of XF with this current upgrade, and with another upgrade project looming in the very near future, this will be very handy.

 

[Wildcat Media]

Actually though, seeing this message, especially while in developer mode, gives a different impression:



This is only on our test server, but I'm thinking now that I need to apply these changes while not in Developer mode, and referring to an add-on (even the "XenForo" add-on) so they will stick even if I return to Developer mode in order to finish up my work?

 

[Chris D]

That’s right. You need to make those changes while not in development mode. That will properly mark them as “customized” so we know to retain those changes when XF or the add-on they belong to is updated.