Versioning Your Stylesheet

Hi folks, I haven’t written any tutorials for a while, I’m waiting on Genesis 1.8 to finish my Genesis Explained series because there are some changes coming to the admin system that would render most of what I said moot.

In the interim, I wanted to get some quick tips out there. Little tricks I use on my site or when developing for clients.

One thing that gets really annoying is cached style sheets. They are a good thing and I would never want to disable them, but if I make a change on my site, like the Child Theme Matrix, and a user has a cached version of my style sheet, things won’t look right. Likewise, when I developing for clients and make a change I want them to see, they won’t see it. The end user can do a hard refresh (ctrl+f5 on the PC) but that’s asking a lot, especially for changes on my site.

That’s why I version my style sheet. The code is really simple and it lets me update the style sheet the world sees when they visit my site. Right now this is what it looks like in my functions.php file

remove_action('genesis_meta', 'genesis_load_stylesheet');
add_action('genesis_meta', 'ntg_load_stylesheet');
/**
 * Loads Versions Style Sheet
 * 
 * @uses wp_enqueue_style()
 * @author Nick the Geek
 *
 */
function ntg_load_stylesheet() {

    wp_enqueue_style( 'ntg-style', get_bloginfo('stylesheet_url'), array(), '1.0.1.4', 'screen' );

}

If I make a CSS change I need to push to the world, I can change “1.0.1.4” to “1.0.1.5”

Hope this helps.

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