Keeping track of changes

I was just wondering how folks keep track of the customizations they do in ProductCart.  The good and bad  of the product is Early Impact in always coming out with updates.  Which, of course, are always for the same modules I've customized.

What I did with my first site was to document the lines that were changed and carefully looked at each update to see which of my changed modules would be over written, then make my changes to the new code.  It was a bit of a bother.

Now I'm onto my second ProductCart site and this much improved forum so I'm hoping that others may have a better way of doing it.

 

I have made quite a few changes to my PC installation. It was only when I saw new releases coming that I realised I had a bit of a problem hacking the code again.

I was considering bundling as much as I could into Functions in a separate include file - that would make them easier to call - but that isn't always practical either with some of the hacks made.

Has anyone got any better ways?
Alternatively can Early Impact give us more of a 'what has changed' list, especially for small changes - that way, for example it they have just put in a "FormatCurrency" in a file, we could add it ourselves rather than editing the new file.

Each PC release includes a text file that explains the modification and details every file that changed due to that modification. Being developers ourselves, it is probably not feasible for PC to send a list of actual code that changed but here is what we do:

1. Keep a list of every module you change with a note about the changes.

2. In the code, place a standard comment at the top and bottom of each section where you make changes. Use the same comment in all places, i.e. "Your Company Name - Start Modification" and then add a detailed comment about the change below the standard comment. This allows you to quickly search within one file or across all files to see where your changes are.

3. For those files you modified where PC includes an updated file, use a file compare utility to compare the original PC file to the updated PC file to see what changes were made. If there are a few PC changes, backwrite those to your file. If there are a lot of PC changes, backwrite your changes to the updated PC file.

I know it's a pain but that's the price of customizing code. We do it all the time.