Turn Historical Changes into VQMOD

hi, i've just discovered that VQMOD is really easy...and i realised that to be able to upgrade later it is advisable to use VQMOD rather than making changes to controller / model files.

does anyone have a good workflow or suggestions for turning historical changes into vqmod files? at present, i need to manually look through each file and find changes but i'm sure there must be a tool out there for comparing file / folder differences to speed this bit up. or best case, maybe some software that will turn file changes straight into vqmod [maybe being a bit hopeful here...].

i'm hunting for solutions myself anyway but thought someone might have a great shortcut for this.

WinMerge ( http://winmerge.org ) will give you a 'diff' comparison of two files, and you can use it to compare directories - You might be able to script something that generates vqMods from that (or at least, gets you closer to a vQMod).

You could also look at version control - GIT ( http://git-scm.com ) is the current darling of version control that all the cool kids are using. It's more for people who are modifying a code base, but it's good practice and worthwhile to practice version control with your vqMods and templates too (especially templates).

thanks for the advice - i'm on osx so i found the Filemerge tool in Xcode. i've managed to undo some of the core file changs i had done already. is there any general advice on which files are ok to change directly, and which should be done via vqmod. at the moment, my current plan is to only change 'image/', 'admin/language/', 'admin/view/', 'catalog/language/', and 'catalog/view/' directly, and change the rest via vqmod.

all admin files shouldn't be edited. All files in catalog shouldn't too, EXCEPT the files in your custom theme folder. That will ensure a smooth upgrade for you in the future