Overview
The look and feel of your Drupal site is referred to as its "theme." The theme (aka "skin") of your site exists (mostly) independent of the content, and can be updated or changed at any time.
Components of Your Theme
Your theme folder (cob_omega) is comprised of :
- CSS (stylesheets)
- Images (background images, iphone icons, favicons, site logo)
- Scripts (mostly Javascript files)
- Libraries (mostly jQuery libraries and fixes for older browsers)
- Layouts (custom Panels and page layouts)
- Fonts (web font files)
- Plugins (custom styles for Panel panes, and not Wordpress-style plugins)
- Sass (dynamic .scss files that are compiled into CSS files)
- template.php (where some custom PHP functions exist)
- Other misc files (gemfile, theme-settings.php, config.rb, theme info file, sourcemap files)
How Your Theme is Built
Using .scss files (Sass), we generate dynamic stylesheets, and control layout. There are many of these files, organized into folders following the Smacss practices. These are complied into just a few .CSS files, and pushed to the server, where web browsers render your theme.
Big Warning #1
If you edit a .CSS file directly, any changes will be lost next time the Sass files are edited and recompiled. We do have a 'temp.css' file, inside the theme "css" folder that exists outside this process, and will not be overwritten by CSS compiling. So if you know a little .CSS but not Sass, you could edit this file and be 'safe.'
Big Warning #2
The theme is part of a git repository. Editing any theme files requires a knowledge of Git, and access to the Git repository. You would want to 'clone' a copy of the files to your deskop, "pull" any updates made to the repo by your web developers, and then "push" your changes back to the repo to make them live.
This process also involves knowledge and access to your hosting set up on Pantheon.com, where 3 different versions of your site exist (dev, test, and live). We push edits to "dev," test, and then push edits up through "test" and "live".
This is not for the faint of heart!
In Conclusion
Our clients almost never edit theme files, including CSS. Only those will developer know-how, .Git knowledge and Pantheon access (and knowledge) are recommended for theme updates. It is our recommendation that any theme updates be carried out via support tickets.
