Pippin Williamson has written a good explanation of which to use over on Wptuts+.
TL;DR: If the functionality is something that should continue to work after you switch themes, then it belongs in a plugin.
Pippin Williamson has written a good explanation of which to use over on Wptuts+.
TL;DR: If the functionality is something that should continue to work after you switch themes, then it belongs in a plugin.
Zialus asked me to explain how I keep my blog’s theme up to date using SVN while keeping my modifications. The answer is too long for Twitter, so I’m writing a small blog post about it.
http://themes.svn.wordpress.org/
. Find your theme there. For example my blog’s theme is http://themes.svn.wordpress.org/mystique/1.72/
(as of the time of this post).svn diff > file.diff
on my local checkout to get a file containing all of my modifications (this will be handy for the next step).svn switch
to switch to the new version SVN URL. Your SVN client will attempt to merge in any changes by the theme author into your modified files, but it may run into collisions (where the theme’s author and you have modified the same area of a file). You’ll need to manually fix any collisions (this is why I check out to my PC instead of my server). I tend to just hit revert on the file and then using the diff file from the previous step for reference, re-add my modifcations.Questions? Feel free to ask via my comments section. 🙂