Users should not edit upstream themes

[Tomer]

Currently, when users are entering the theme editor from the administration UI, they get the ability to edit the theme with very basic knowledge required. The downside with that that their tweaks will lost as soon as they update the theme or if this is WordPress default theme if they update the WordPress core.

I purpose the following change – Users will be prompted with a message if they try to edit a message with an upstream link and presumably won't be able to edit the theme styles. Instead, they will get the opportunity to automatically create a child theme of the upstream theme with a default template which might contain theme metadata, and @include rule to add the stylesheet of the other theme.

Making this will help promote the usage of child themes and will make it easier to novice bloggers to hack their themes. It is also better from the current implementation by extensions as it doesn't require runtime database queries to fetch the additional author stylesheet.

[Tomer]

If implemented, two files should be automatically generated – style.css and rtl.css; both files should @include the same files in the upstream theme.

[scribu]

This sounds like a decent first step in making the theme editor more fool-proof.

There should also be a way for themes to say "Hey, it's ok if you edit me directly". Most straighforward way would be to define a new header field which can go into style.css. Example:

DirectlyEditable: yes

[maorb]

+1 for this

[c3mdigital]

It's a good idea in theory but I don't think we should be limiting users ability to modify a theme. I agree that the "right" way is to create a child theme but if a user just wants to change a text color or some other simple css they should be able to.

Maybe just a warning message letting them know that if they update the theme their changes will be lost and a link to how to create a child theme.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Replying to c3mdigital:

Maybe just a warning message letting them know that if they update the theme their changes will be lost and a link to how to create a child theme.

We already have the warning in the Help tab: tags/3.6/wp-admin/theme-editor.php#L33​. Perhaps in should be more prominent.

[c3mdigital]

Closing. If anyone wants to pursue making the warning more prominent please open a new ticket.