I recently migrated a website from Jekyll to Joomla (currently 3.9). Therefore I made an own Joomla Template. It is already in production, but of course it gets regular updates. I use a quite standard development/release approach, versioning like 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1 and so on. These numbers are always up to date in templateDetails.xml. Nothing special so far. But this has some very inconvenient issues:
Every time I upgrade the template I have to set a different template/style as default, uninstall the old version, upload and install the current version and set its style as new default. Is there really no better way for upgrading a template, especially if it has an higher version?
For each update all my configurations of the style get lost. I already put the defaults accordingly in the templateDetails.xml, so I don't have to do this on every upgrade. But I can imagine this may cause problems when I change the configuration in the back end without updating the template. This would result in potential configuration loss after an upgrade. Can I keep any style configuration when upgrading?
Third, I'm thinking of using different styles for different pages on my website. These would also get lost when upgrading, so I'd have to redefine them regularly. I also would have to reconfigure all pages using these styles to use them again. Is there a way to define several styles in templateDetails.xml, so they are stored in my zip file?
Every time I upgrade the template I have to set a different template/style as default, uninstall the old version, upload and install the current version and set its style as new default. Is there really no better way for upgrading a template, especially if it has an higher version?
For each update all my configurations of the style get lost. I already put the defaults accordingly in the templateDetails.xml, so I don't have to do this on every upgrade. But I can imagine this may cause problems when I change the configuration in the back end without updating the template. This would result in potential configuration loss after an upgrade. Can I keep any style configuration when upgrading?
Third, I'm thinking of using different styles for different pages on my website. These would also get lost when upgrading, so I'd have to redefine them regularly. I also would have to reconfigure all pages using these styles to use them again. Is there a way to define several styles in templateDetails.xml, so they are stored in my zip file?