On Sunday, March 13, 2011 7:47:56 pm Fred Jones wrote:
These days, theme's are viewed much like contributed modules which code you usually do not alter but rather override in other places. Personally, I think themes are quite different from modules and that there's a good chance that future ameliorations of a theme produce unexpected results on your website but, nevertheless, this seems to be the current mainstream thinking nowadays.
Yes, that's exactly what I feel. I was always nervous that I will make a subtheme and then in 2 months we will upgrade and then my client will call me on the phone frantic that I "broke" page X. He won't know that it's due to a CSS change in the new version of the theme.
Has anyone else experienced this? Or is it basically considered safe to use a subtheme and rely on the main theme author not to do something stupid?
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.
--Larry Garfield