[wp-hackers] Child themes, theme revisions, and the theme editor

[Mike Schinkel]

On Mar 23, 2010, at 2:12 AM, Andrew Nacin wrote:
>> Impossible?  Difficult maybe, but impossible?  What if we eliminate some
>> assumptions?
> Say you're editing "archive.php". The issue is, you don't know on which
> pages "archive.php" is actually used, due to template hierarchy and numerous
> filters in the template API and template loader. So you can't request the
> home page (which most likely does not include "archive.php") or any other
> page and say with certainty that "archive.php" works. And specifically
> loading "archive.php" may generate errors simply because the file wasn't
> included in the way that the theme intended it to be.

Fair point.  I do think it's possible to map such things manually or even automatically, but I see that's it's not elegant to do that, at least not from where we are now.

> Again, the purpose of sandboxing is to prevent showstoppers. A template file
> will not take down every aspect of your blog the way functions.php will.

Similarly, I was more worried about the global files like header.php and footer.php, ones that kill the entire site albeit don't kill the admin.

> 
> I appreciate the feedback on this. That said, the proposal revolves around
> some bigger ideas -- revisioning and child themes in particular -- and I
> would not want those to be overshadowed by discussions on technical
> implementation.

Hope you can tackle it, even if it's only a smaller scope.  Small steps are good.

-Mike