Stories from July 1st, 2008

Tools to help you use Pixaria

Regular users of Pixaria may not be aware of three important tools and utilities I offer to help with the process of managing and upgrading your Pixaria website.

To remedy this, I thought it might be useful to give a quick run through of some of the utilities in the 'Extras' area of Pixaria.com:

Release notes

Whenever a new update to Pixaria is released, the release notes page is the place to look to see details of everything that's changed since the previous version.

Every change ever made to Pixaria is included in the release notes which makes them an important resource to use when upgrading. Major changes such as the renaming of files and folders or the removal or modification of major features which may affect how your site works are always highlighted.

File change log

To complement the release notes, I also produce a file change log for every release which lists all the files that changed since the previous version. This is useful if you've made lots of modifications to your site or just want to know which files to replace to upgrade your website.

Template comparison tool

As an additional resource for sites with heavily customised themes, the template comparison tool goes beyond the detail of the file change log and allows you to perform side by side comparisons of all the template files between any two versions of the script. The line by line file comparison simplifies the process of finding which parts of your custom theme need to be modified to match the default look and feel when upgrading.