Customization and LTS releases

[ivo]

Hi,

 

I don't know if I'm the only one in this situation, but we have a heavily customized WHMCS setup - we have custom smarty functions, some custom PHP, and pretty much all TPL files are customized.

 

Mu understanding is that if we choose an LTS release, we want to be able to stick with it for its entire lifespan, and only have to apply security patches (which should only affect encoded PHP files which we can't personalize anyways).

 

My problem is that over the past few months, we've been forced to upgrade the whole system twice, and each time re-apply all our personalizations to the new code. And each time, this is hours upon hours of work.

 

Wouldn't it make more sense for the devs to introduce new features to a development version and maintain the LTS version in such a way that personalizations made to the initial release of the LTS will remain compatible for the lifetime of that release? This way, we wouldn't have to re-code and debug every time there's a security issue?

 

I didn't ask for smarty to be updated. Unfortunately, in order to apply the latest security patches (5.2.13 and 5.2.14), I am, once again, forced to re-code all my smarty and TPL customizations just because a few new features got bundled with some much needed security patches.

 

--Ivo

(aka, not a happy camper right now)