Help - I just upgraded and lost my changes!

First up the good news - your changes are not lost if you have used the Marketplace to upgrade your module or skin.

The way the Marketplace works when you do an upgrade is it moves the new, upgraded version of the module or skin in as the "active" module or skin, and renames the old module or skin directory to a different name. This means your changes are never lost, they just aren't visible since the (modified) version of the module or skin is not active.

If however you uploaded the new version of the skin or module via FTP and overwrote your existing files, then your changes would be lost (assuming you did not make a backup).

To recover your changes or customizations, log into your Jamroom site using FTP and go to the modules (or skins) directory. For this example we will assume you made your customizations in the "Audio Support" module. The Audio Support module is located in the "jrAudio" directory (you can get the directory name for a module or skin from the "info" tab in the ACP).

When logged in via FTP, I will see a directory structure that looks like this:


Yours may look different depending on what you had upgraded or installed, but you should see at least 2 entries:

- jrAudio - this is a symbolic link that simply "points" to the active jrAudio directory (in this case jrAudio-release-1.1.0). This will br active version of the jrAudio module.

Underneath that you can see another directory - jrAudio-release-1.0.3. This is the next older version that was running on the site before it was upgraded to jrAudio-1.1.0. Inside this directory you will find your customized files!.

It's important to know the proper method for customizing a Jamroom template!

First - never log in via FTP and customize or change templates directly in a module's templates directory - i.e.

modules/jrAudio/templates/item_detail.tpl

DO NOT modify that file! The next time you upgrade, your changes will no longer be visible!

The same goes for a Skin directory - i.e.

skins/jrElastic/meta.tpl

DO NOT change that file! The next time you upgrade the Elastic skin via the Marketplace your changes will no longer show.

Like outlined above, your changes are not lost - they just are no longer active.

The first step to customizing Jamroom correctly is to Clone the Skin you want to customize. So for our example we will clone the jrElastic skin:

1) Download and install the Jamroom Developer Tools module from the Marketplace module inside your Jamroom, or download it here:

https://www.jamroom.net/the-jamroom-network/networkmarket/50/developer-tools

and upload it to your site using FTP.

2) Once installed and activated, go to Developer Tools -> Tools -> Clone Skin and select the skin you want to customize. Give your skin a new, custom name and press the "Clone Skin" button.

Now you have a COPY of the skin you want to customize that will never be changes during an upgrade.

So getting back to the template we want to customize, we are going to create a new file in the skin directory we just cloned.

For this example let's pretend we named our cloned skin "Clone". When I log in via FTP and go to the skins directory, I will now see something like this:


So "Clone" is now the active skin - it's a copy of the jrElastic skin, and is where I'm going to do my modifications.

Earlier we want to customize the following template:

modules/jrAudio/templates/item_detail.tpl

so to do that, I'm going to create the following new file:

skins/Clone/jrAudio_item_detail.tpl

and customize it to suit my needs. When Jamroom "sees" there is a module override template located in the active skin directory, it will use that template in place of the default template that is provided by the module.

So once we've done that, we are good to go:

- our changes to the jrAudio item_detail.tpl cannot be made inactive by upgrading the Audio module
- since we are making our changes to the "Clone" skin, it cannot be made inactive by upgrading the jrElastic skin.