[support] Why SubTheme?

[Fred Jones]

> At the risk of sounding seditious, there's no reason you *have* to upgrade a
> base theme after the site is built unless there's a security update.  In my
> experience security holes in the good/popular base themes are extremely rare,
> so if you want to build your site on a given release of Zen and then a new Zen
> release comes out you can most likely just ignore it.

That's what the point of making a subtheme? Why not just make a custom
version of Zen or Blueprint and then avoid seeing that yellow warning
every time you visit the Updates page?

I don't make themes from scratch--what I usually do is take an
existing them, and change the name to something else and then
customize it.

> The main reason I would subtheme is to allow easier updates to your framework/starter theme from d.o. If you have just hacked those themes downloaded from d.o, you have to merge your changes back in. Of course that can be done with git, but I still think sub-theming is better.

But then you run the risk of the upgrade breaking something, no?

>  If someone else looks at your site, it will be easier for them to see what is going on..

Don't see why it's easier to deal with a main theme and then a
subtheme as opposed to just one custom theme. Could well be more
complicated with a base and subtheme in fact.

> Why am I so stupid? Everybody else can restore a whole site in 60 seconds . :(

Perhaps you misunderstood what I meant--I didn't say debug and fix, I
said "restore" which means to put back the old code which I had just
moved to a different directory anyway and then import the previous
version of the DB which I just saved. Actually I don't see those two
operations either via ssh or a good Control Panel should take more
than a minute. After that, of course one probably needs to make a dev
copy of the site and run the upgrade and then examine what the issue
is etc. etc.

I'm not trying to be unpleasant, just trying to understand here--but I
still haven't heard a compelling reason for a simple one-theme site to
use a subtheme. Maybe there isn't one...

Thanks,
Fred