Doing customisation work on Storefront based child themes, purchased from Woo, is painful, as the themes are sold are child themes.
You are smart guys, you have build systems in place; why not use them to build and sell parent themes, incorporating Storefront base functionality, plus paid theme customisations? Automated builds when Storefront is updated can’t be that hard…
As it stands, updates to Storefront, with paired child theme updates, will erase all customisations made. Use of the theme-customisation plugin is useful only for basic customisations (css overrides, functions.php, top level templates). Anything more involved will be lost on theme update- this includes overridden woocommerce template files, which is pretty daft considering you are selling these themes as WooCommerce ready, and you make both products….
Providing scss source files, as you do is also pointless, as devs don’t want to deploy a complete sheet in addition to the base sheet the child theme has. The underlying message here seems to be “here, have the source files – but don’t use them, because updates will erase the changes you’ve made!”
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Last updated: January 4, 2016
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> Automated builds when Storefront is updated can’t be that hard…
It’s not, but that would make the product feel rather un-wordpressy. Essentially the same issue with have with our old WooFramework.
Ultimately, if you’re modifying a child theme beyond what is possible with our Theme Customisations plugin then you’re making quite significant changes. At that point it really becomes a separate entity that is probably better off being managed independently anyway.
The child themes are offered to use as-is with an easy way to make simple modifications (theme customisations plugin, custom css plugin, etc). If you’re doing something more than that then a custom solution (based on a child theme or not) will probably suit you better.