Stop Deprecating Skinsets

[Dreadknux]

Now I understand that changes have to be made to the core codebase whenever a new version of IPB is written. But in the last couple of updates (3.0.3 and now 3.0.4) I have had skins that I have developed during the 3.0.1 era break completely on me, because of deprecated skin code and a complete disregard of the skin's CSS on browsers (possibly as a result of deprecated skin code). Now, as I have worked very hard on my unique themes and they are vastly different from the IPB default skin, simply implementing the Skin Differences published is easier said than done, nor should I expect to constantly update my skins in this manner.

I was led to believe that when 3.0.0 was released, that custom skins could be created without fear of them breaking in future releases. This has turned out to be a false belief. Skins made the second a brand new version is released should be supported 100% until the very end of that version's life cycle. If nothing else, I would expect the money I paid for this software (and services) to reflect this, considering I have no time in my life now to micro-manage my skins whenever an incremental update comes out.

IPS, figure out where you want to be with your skin design and stick to it, please! Stop changing your mind every twenty seconds and invalidating my custom skins. I would like some confirmation that this issue will not occur again in future updates, otherwise I might as well just not make skins for my forums again (what would be the point?).

Regards,
Svend Joscelyne.

[Ryan H.]

What is breaking about your skins? There shouldn't be anything that causes them to stop working properly outright.

[Mark]

Skins should continue to function so long as you apply the changes in the skin difference report we provide.

Point changes are only bug fixes - we don't "change our minds every twenty seconds" - if there is a bug in the skin... we have to fix it ;)

[Matt]

Indeed. Skins you create for 3.0.0 will work in 3.0.4 but you may have to tweak them with the very latest bug fixes. This is why we publish a skin diff so you know exactly what we changed and you can see if it impacts you or not.

Of course, in an ideal world, IP.Board would be able to automatically detect what has changed and fix it manually but no such tool could be written due to all the different possible combinations of HTML code. As a trivial example, if an original template as:



And you changed that to:



Then it would be impossible to automatically apply changes based on:



Even SVN (code versioning system) can't do that. The best it can do is tell you that the changes cannot be applied and it will have to be resolved manually.

<strong><a href='http://google.com'>Google</a></strong>

<div style='font-weight:bold'><a href='http://google.com'>Google</a></div>

<em><a href='http://google.com'>Google</a></em>

[rct2·com]

[quote name='Matt' date='12 October 2009 - 09:15 AM' timestamp='1255335329' post='1865677']This is why we publish a skin diff so you know exactly what we changed and you can see if it impacts you or not.

Indeed, but add to that the fact that AdminCP colour codes all the skin bits that you have changed in a custom skin, and the 2 together make it possible to quickly focus in on the areas that need looking at in your custom skins.