@Gardner,
Based on this post, and a
tutorial on using the theme .less files for customization, I have been able to move most of my .less custom code and variables into the theme subfolder, on a localhost copy of my live site. However, it doesn't seem like a fully robust solution, and I have a couple of questions.
First some background. The site a is simple business brochure type site, only four pages, for my local business, so the code is relatively simple. I read somewhere in the documentation that customizations to the .less code could be added to one of the .less files in the /templates/t3_bs3_blank/less subfolder, preferably style.less. I can't seem to find that reference at the moment. So I developed the site originally by customizing the .less in bs3 style.less and the variables in bs3 variables.less. There is no custom css code and no custom.css file. The site contains one theme that applies to all pages, which was put there originally to adjust the font size from 14 point to 15 point, an make a couple of color adjustments.
When I initially attempted to move the code by following the tutorial, I split the code between template.less, template-responsive.less and variables.less in the theme subfolder. The site completely broke, and badly. So I gave up for a while. But this weekend I found some time to play around with it, and experiment some, and I found that I can successfully move the majority of the code to the template.less file, and the variables to the variables.less file in the theme subfolder.
But I encountered these problems:
My site has a background image in the t3-header, and a fixed repeating background image in the body. I was unable to move the url declarations to the template.less file, or any other file, and had to keep it in the original style.less file for it to work. The code is
.t3-header {
background: url(@header-image) center center;
}
body {
background-image: url(@outside-background-image);
//background-attachment: fixed;
}
The interesting thing about the body declaration is that the background-attachment: fixed; declaration does work in the theme's template.less file but the url declaration does not.
Secondly, since there is an assignment in the bs3 variables.less file that assigns
@t3-border-color: @hr-border;
I adjusted the color for the borders with the following
@hr-border: darken(@navbar-default-bg, 6.5%);
When this code is placed in the theme's variables.less file, it causes the font size adjustment to be overridden and go back to the 14 point default size. I could solve that by changing the declaration to
@t3-border-color: darken(@navbar-default-bg, 6.5%);
Further, I experimented with creating a style.less file in the theme folder as suggested earlier in this thread, but I was unable to get any code to be recognized when placed in this file.
1.) Is there a way of getting the images into the theme folder?
2.) Is the second issue I mentioned a bug in the compiler? Is it likely that other issues like this exist?
3.) Is there a way to get user created files to be recognized by the compiler?
By the way, I didn't test any of this with the less-to-css compiler, only the on-the-fly development mode compiler. But for this to be a robust solution, all code would need to work with development mode turned on during development.