How to upgrade a heavily customised theme?

[Spark]

Im a bit of a noob to whmcs. I have a heavily customised clientx theme. I should continue recieving core updates but I cant continue recieving theme updates because of customisation on theme.  Of course theme will eventually break if I continue getting core updates without updating it too.

So my idea now is to get a developer to treat the theme like a custom theme and update it manually everytime it needs to be upgraded to stay online with core.

Is this approach standard practice? 

Is there any other maintenance option I haven't considered?

If you have maintain your own theme yourself, can you comment on how expensive it is to do ongoing?

Thanks in advance 

 

[yggdrasil]

Having a custom theme involves having to merge the changes on each upgrade. There is no way around this. You would have to either 1: Document every single customization change you made, then re-add those changes on each upgrade or either 2) Have your developer compare all the changes from the latest themes and merge them with your code. That is what most developers do.  Basically it involves:

1. Taking the latest WHMCS theme files.

2. Comparing them with your current ones.

3. Merging the code changes.

That way you will not lose your customizations. If you are not a web developer or designer, this will be harder than it sounds here because you will not understand what the new code does in the latest updates. If that is the case, I would advise you to contact the original theme developer in order to have an update.

If you are the ones making the customization to a theme, then my advice is to document the changes in the future. The biggest mistake people make is never documenting what changes they make to their files, code and software. Then when it comes to upgrades it will be a nightmare, because you will have no idea what you changed since the last update.

You will have to completely forget auto updates if you are making changes. I never do auto updates on any software for that reason. WHMCS in particular. I do all upgrades manually and compare every single file and every single line of code in order to only add the new code updates I want or need. The more changes you made, the more time-consuming each update will be, but that is the cost of having something branded or personalized to fit your business.

Edited April 10, 2020 by yggdrasil