How are the custom website UI changes handled
Thrinacia handles custom website changes and future automatic updates as per following:
1. If you are on stock un-modified version of the Web UI then you will automatically receive all future updates without doing anything special and there is nothing to do here.
2. If you start modifying Website layout via SFTP or GIT methods you are essentially forking off or moving in another direction away from the stock versions of controllers, views, partials and so on. We then need to exclude whole website from being updated (Known as Full Exclusion Method)
Normally customer will tell Thrinacia if they are to be using Full Exclusion Method when their website is customized. At that point we will enable full exclusion on their website and provide the customer with access to the main GIT repository so they can track the changes/updates and integrate such changes themselves. We also send automatic notifications whenever the updates are released.
Custom Update Method Explained
Full Exclusion Method means that all website files will be excluded from future updates. You are essentially locked in to a specific version at that point in time customizing on your own line of development and don’t care about any future updates or want to perform those yourself only. In this case we will add a flag to completely skip your website from any future updates. Advantages are here is that it’s guaranteed nothing will break on your website as there are no automatic updates performed which could cause issues with your customized files. Disadvantages are is that you need to apply all future updates manually yourself.
Keeping up with updates when website is customized is a more complex topic, because source codebase for customized website (once the customer elects to customize website via SFTP or GIT) where the layout or look and feel is completely changed for example will differ from the stock versions and onus is on the customer to resolve such conflicts with their own team or by hiring our team to perform such custom changes for them if future updates or changes are indeed needed.
REST API on the other hand is not customized for each customer and is kept backward compatible so it never breaks any functionality. When new custom REST API extensions or features are requested they are added to all REST API backends so everyone can benefit from them in a same and uniform way.