Changing Theme Colors

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I am trying to learn how version 5.8 of Concrete5 works and I'm confused about theme customization and presets. Before trying any of this I read about less, which seem straight forward.

I have installed the Cloneamental Theme on my development server with the latest version of Concrete 5.8. So as not to screw anything up, I copied the presets file default.less to defaults_backup.css. I then opened defaults.less and changed the preset-name to Hiking.

On the test homepage I logged in as the admin, selected page setting and then design and changed the preset to hiking. I then tried to customize the theme by changing the background color for the header to 96c93d. Saved the changes across the entire site. The color changed but my preset was no longer set to Hiking.

If I reselect Hiking as my preset I lost the customization.

I then tried to edit the hiking preset file, setting the header-background-color to 96c93d . After making the edit I went back into the website page settings and selected and saved the preset Hiking. This time the change seemed to worked properly.

Should I be changing the preset file directly to get the colors I want for my theme as opposed to using theme customization? If so, not sure of the purpose behind theme customization. If I change the preset file, should I be recompiling/minifying the less files or is this something that happens on the fly.

I will also note that I cleared the concrete5 cache and the browser cache during the testing to make sure what I was seeing was not the result of cached files.

Any clarification would be sincerely appreciated.

 
MrKDilkington replied on at Permalink Reply
MrKDilkington
dgreer replied on at Permalink Reply
Sorry for the delay in responding. I have read the documentation. What is confusing is the changes made to colors, for example, don't seem to get written back to the preset file. Instead they seem to end up in the cache -- even with all the caching settings turned off. It might be helpful to explain in more detail how this mechanism works. For the time being, I am directly editting the default preset. It is easier and I have not lost anymore of my changes.
Gondwana replied on at Permalink Reply
Gondwana
It wouldn't surprise me if such customisations are stored in the site database, as opposed to a normal file. That would explain the over-riding and caching you've observed.
bonovasitch replied on at Permalink Reply
Hey dgreer,

Did you eventually find a straightforward answer to this question? As a first time user I'm experiencing the same confusion to what you've spelled out in your post.

Where are theme customizations getting saved if not to the preset file?
dgreer replied on at Permalink Reply
I have never figured out where changes are stored. The process works inconsistently. I now just copy the relevant stylesheets to a new name (as per my previous post) and then edit the stylesheet directly.
bonovasitch replied on at Permalink Reply
@dgreer
Thanks for the reply.

If I make changes to the preset file manually the update doesn't appear on the site when I refresh. I have turned off all caching. It seems I have to use Customize Theme to choose a different preset and then back again in order to see my changes.

Did you find out if there was some kind of compiling step that needs to happen that I can do manually?
dgreer replied on at Permalink Reply
Hi-

I copied one of the presets to a new name, in my case hiking, and made the changes to the file.

All caching is off on my development system and I cleared my browser history.

I then went into custom the theme and selected hiking. After that I was able to make changes to the hiking theme without any problems.

Hope this helps.