How to work on skin without redeploying after every change?
 

Is there any way to do this? I can't find it any of the documentation, and forum searches are not helping.

How can we turn off caching and regenerating/minifying js and css?

Sig says x-cart classic, but I'm currently playing with 5.1.7, trying to decide whether to move clients onto it. If there's no easy way to deal with skins/templates, there's no way x-cart 5 is going to be an attractive option.

Re: How to work on skin without redeploying after every change?
 

You don't have to regenerate cache when making changes to skin files - tpl, css, js. You have to regenerate it if you are making changes to php files. One way to avoid this when modifying php files is to modify the file under /var/run directory and when satisfied with the changes repeat them on the actual file under /classes/XLite

The cache regeneration is extremely annoying and it has been discussed here before, unfortunately so far there is no actual solution to this

Re: How to work on skin without redeploying after every change?
 

In order to be able to edit templates without store re-deployment, you need to enable developer_mode as explained here:
http://kb.x-cart.com/display/XDD/Step+1+-+creating+simplest+module#Step1-creatingsimplestmodule-Packingupyourmodule

Re: How to work on skin without redeploying after every change?
 

EDIT: Never mind. I found it. For anyone else who comes across this thread, setting are under System Settings > Look & Feel > tab: Performance

Thanks, cflsystems and tony. I have already enabled developer_mode. However, css is still being converted to cached files, although it appears those are forced to reload during developer_mode. Any way to prevent renaming of those files so that we can better see exactly where css properties are writtem?

Re: How to work on skin without redeploying after every change?
 

Argh. There's normalizer css that overrides color specifications, which is very annoying. I understand the need to normalize placement and general layout characteristics, but color should not be set this way.

Is this being achieved through JS? I can't seem to find where it is.

Re: How to work on skin without redeploying after every change?
 

Not sure I am following you about normalizer that overrides the color specs. Could you explain it a bit?

Re: How to work on skin without redeploying after every change?
 

It looked as though bootstrap css was being pulled in after theme.css.

After double-checking to make sure I had set developer_mode to "On" in config.php (check), making sure everything was unchecked under Look & Feel > Performance (check), and making sure theme.css was not being served in an aggregated state (check), and emptying browser cache repeatedly, some color instructions in theme.css were still being ignored in favor of color specifications in bootstrap css.

I manually deleted all cached files in /var, and now it appears that theme.css overrides bootstrap css as it should. I'm not sure if that's what did it or it was coincidental to some other change, but it's OK now.