Style Deletions

[fastcars]

I notice that its possible to either delete or deactivate any styles you may have installed on your site. But what is the difference between deletion and deactivation? I know it sounds obvious when reading this post but in practice they both seem to do the same thing. Deleted styles can be un-deleted in exactly the same way as as deactivated styles can be re-activated.
Is there a reason for the two options?

[Patrick]

Hey fastcars,

Interesting question. From the documentation of phpBB 3, my take is that the biggest benefit of deactivation is that when a style isn't active, the admin can still use it. This would allow you to easily work on a new design without having to give your members access to it.

Deactivation is just meant as an easy way to turn a style on and off and take it out of public view whereas delete removes the style from the installation.

I hope that helps.

Thanks,

Patrick

[fastcars]

Thanks for the reply Patrick
I deleted a couple of old Christmas themes that we no longer use but some days later when I checked google webmaster my site was showing over 19,000 crawl errors which weren't there previously. I thought that maybe by deactivating the styles instead of deleting them it may have avoided this as it also had a negative downward effect on our google page rank.

[Thoul]

Here's one more difference between deleting and deactivating.

Let's say you have these conditions:

• Two styles named subsilver and subother are installed,
• subother uses template inheritance that allows it to use some or all of subsilver's template files without duplicating those files in the subother folder,
• You don't want users to select subsilver as their board style

In this situation, you can't delete subsilver. If you try, the board should tell you it has to be installed for subother to work (technically, only the template part of subsilver has to be installed, but the principal is the same). So, what you would have to do to prevent people from selecting subsilver is to deactivate subsilver.

[fastcars]

Thanks Thoul, I didn't notice anything telling me that one particular style had to be installed for the other to work properly.
What I've done though is un-delete all styles I had deleted and now I've deactivated them instead only leaving the one I use (Chronicles) fully active.
I'll keep an eye on the crawl errors and see if they start coming down again.

[Patrick]

Thanks for sharing that, Jeremy.

Patrick