Re-customizing updated templates

[amanda_2011]

Hello,

I've upgraded a copy of my forum on localhost. The theme I've been using, chameleon, is working pretty well, but some templates which were customized prior to the upgrade need editing.

I've gone to Find Updated Templates as instructed, but don't understand how to go from there. Is this supposed to be done manually? Or are there some tools out there to simplify this? I want to keep the updated templates but install my customizations. It just seems too much work to do it manually, quite impossible to to sit there and compare while looking for changes.

There must be a simpler way to do it which I am not aware of. Someone suggested Winmerge, but if so, where do I find the template files to upload to Winmerge?

Grateful for help.

[.m.]

templates are not available as files and there is no automatic feature for updating them
code in templates should be updated manually based on the color highlighted suggestions

Visit your Admin Control Panel, then go to Templates & Style > Templates > Find Updated Templates. This will show you a list of all the templates that have changed during the upgrade.

You can either revert these templates to their default - meaning all the changes you've made to it will be removed - or you can see a Diff Report which will show you exactly what's changed. If you have a custom theme installed, it is probably best that you look at the Diff Report and apply the changes you need.

[amanda_2011]

code in templates should be updated manually based on the color highlighted suggestions

When we updated the forum from 1.6.5 to 1.6.11 in one step, we did use a comparison tool like Winmerge to compare the old templates with the new ones. It can be done. Unfortunately the guy who helped me with this is unavailable at the moment, thus my question here.

---

Got a chance to talk to my guy now. Apparently what we compared was the php files in the new and old forum directory. He confirmed that templates are not to be found in file format but need to be looked at manually.