What Not to Do

Rock is about freedom and empowerment. There are only a couple of things you should not do under any circumstances, for your own good.

  1. Update Global Styles: You do not want to update any of the .less files contained in the ~/Styles/ folder. We guarantee that these files will be overwritten by each update. If you would like to override a specific styling you will want to do that in the CSS/Less files of your custom themes.
  2. Change the Rock Theme: The Rock theme will also be updated in new releases. This theme serves the internal site and should not be altered.
  3. Change the Stark Theme: The Stark theme will also be updated in new releases. If you would like to make changes to this theme, please copy and paste it to create a new theme.
  4. Create a New Internal Site Theme: If you would like to alter the look of the internal site, you could create a new internal theme. We highly recommend that you refrain from doing so. As we add new functionality, we will be extending the internal theme to work specifically with these new features. It's likely that your custom internal theme will not have the correct styling to properly display these new pages and blocks. Remember this theme is only viewed by your internal staff and some volunteers. We recommend putting all your effort into your external themes which are viewable by a much wider audience.
  5. Add Scripts to the Global Scripts Folder: You should not add any custom JavaScript files to the Scripts folder located at the root of the file system. Instead use either the scripts folder under a specific custom theme or add a script folder in the Plugins folder.
  6. Use the External Site as Your Site: You might be tempted to jump in and start using the external site that comes with Rock as your external (public-facing) site. Keep in mind that we add pages and blocks to this site as we create new features in Rock, and those changes could conflict with changes you’ve made. Think of the out-of-the-box external site as a “best practice” site to reference when you’re creating your own site. To build your own site, you’ll need to create a new site and start adding pages to it. If you want your site to start off like the one that ships with Rock, you can copy the External Homepage and child pages, then point them to the new site. This is similar to the process described for copying the Landing Page. As we add new pages and blocks to Rock, you may need to manually copy those pages or blocks to your new site to see the updates. Updates to existing blocks will generally not require any action unless, for instance, new required block settings fields are added.

We have a few other suggestions for things to avoid in our Admin Hero Guide.