I've been running Gossamer Forums since 1.0.0, and have upgraded twice.

I also have heavily modified both the user templates and the global variables to have my own colour scheme as well as "look and feel".

The problem I have is that every time I upgrade, it overwrites my templates in terms of the global variables; which control the colour scheme, the way in which the body_tag and body_table are defined, etc.

How would I go about protecting these, while at the same time getting the extra functionality that the version increments provide?

The way I do it now is by generating unified diffs and patching the appropriate files. It's a bit painful though.

Is there an option that I'm missing? Or is it as simple as creating a seperate directory for a template set and setting that as default? Will that handle the global vars as well?

Thanks for any and all help!