At the beginning of a deployment for a client’s whose staff have a broad level of technical capability/tolerance. In early user testing we’ve found a couple of areas where we’d like to change labels/sample text and so on. We’ve identified where we could make those changes but wanted to check what best practice would be, or more specifically:
where/how can we make such changes such that they wouldn’t get over written during an upgrade?
Specific example:
in “Sharing” tab for a file or folder, we want to change the en_GB of “Share with users, groups or remote users…” to “Start typing name to share with known users or groups”. We think we can see where that text is to edit it, but the file in question looks like part of the core. If we change it, will it get overwritten and/or need manually updating? If yes to either, is there a better option for making this sort of change?
Further: when trying our changes, we found that the l10n settings don’t seem to apply; to change text we had to make the changes in core js files rather than in the en_GB ones that are both the server default and the test user’s preference. Some config setting we’ve missed?
If these are general changes which would improve the interface for everybody, you should consider to submit some changes via github. These changes will go through the review process and probably not all ideas make it to the NC code.
Yeah, we’ll happily submit them to github - but still wouldn’t know which files to submit changes to (officially); as the ones associated with translations don’t seem to get used (or there’s something wrong with that particular client’s installation…).
What if you edit it as custom theme?
Copy the entire core into the custom folder and edit it there.
I am not sure if all changes will be applied, but I am sure it won’t overwritten when you update NC.
Custom theme probably best route forward, as our testing showed we had to edit the main files anyway as the translations seemed not to be active, even when set both server-wide and by individual users. We’ll add notes here about progress and then submit the changed text to github when it seems relevant.
Also, if you edit the core directly without copying to custom theme folder, NC will show that there is code integrity problems.
Since people often customize their own themes, I think NC should set default theme setup to point to theme folder, which I think is a good practice as well, preventing people from editing the original core, and so people always have something to roll back to when they mess up.