How To Create Concrete5 Override And Protect Against Theme Updates

Risk/Concern/Problem

When you make changes to the theme files in Concrete5, those changes can get lost when you update the theme.  One easy way to avoid this is to create a duplicate copy of the theme that will act as an Override.  Instead of making your changes directly to the theme folder files, you would make the changes to the theme override copy, and those changed files would get overwritten when a theme gets updated.  The changes done to the override files will apply to the updated theme as well.

Override Creation Same As Theme Duplication

Creating a theme override is really the same as duplicating a theme, but not changing the folder name as described in the article of HowTo Copy Concrete5 Theme.  So you will see the same beginning steps mentioned in this article.

Creating A Theme Copy To Act As An Override

To make things easier for this article, lets pretend you want to duplicate the default theme that comes with Concrete5, and that is Greek Yogurt. 

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1. Access your hosting file system.  This would not involve the Concrete5 control panel/Dashboard.  Hopefully you have a great hosting like Web Hosting With 1 Dollar (WHW1), and have all the needed tools easily from the hosting control panel.  I will be using File Manager from within WHW1's cpanel.  You will want to locate the folder and sub-folders of /concrete/themes/greek_yogurt, which is most likely in the public_html folder.  I just use WHW1's File Manager search to simply locate greek_yogurt.  In my case, the folder name and path would be /public_html/concrete/themes/greek_yogurt.  If you need help using the File Manager, there is a tutorial for it at http://www.whw1.com/a1/tutorials/cpanel-tutorials/.  You can also use any FTP software, or direct folder access method (like WHW1's Web Disk), or whatever means you prefer to access the folders and files.  There is a list of free FTP softwares and tutorials for each at http://www.whw1.com/a1/tutorials/file-transfer-tutorials/.
   
   
2. Copy the existing theme folder (greek_yogurt in this example) from the /public_html/concrete/themes folder to the /public_html/themes folder.  Your main hosting folder might be something else like www instead of public_html.  The result would be:
   
   /public_html/themes/greek_yogurt

Finished - Summary

Now, any changes you make to a php files or other files in the /public_html/themes/greek_yogurt folder will reflect on your site when you are making use of the Greek Yogurt theme.  This means the changes you make in the /public_html/themes/greek_yogurt folder overrides what is indicated in the /public_html/concrete/themes/greek_yogurt folder.

What C5 Versions Was This Tried On?

Tried on a few, but in general 5.6.x.x.

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