I've started modifying Montezuma for my site. Following best practices for a 'normal' theme used to involve making a child theme, and then doing CSS changes in a new Style.css there

Now I see an Edit CSS option in the Wordpress sidebar, and that's where I've put all my CSS mods, and everything works.

But I've noticed most threads here talk about making changes to the individual CSS files through the Montezuma options, and in one 'newbie' thread JerryC talked about using the 'Lazyest Stylesheet Plugin'..

Assuming they all work - are there real benefits or drawbacks to any of these methods - or is it just down to personal preference?

I know I like to keep all my changes (and mistakes!) in one place.....

You should avoid making custom changes to any theme with the theme editor since the next time you update the theme the changes will be wiped out by the update process.

Montezuma has a series of options for editing the CSS. When you use the options in the theme, the changes are stored in the database as a theme option. No need to create a child theme or use a plugin. My suggestion is to add any CSS overrides to the end of the 'clearfix.css' so you can find them quickly and they are all grouped together.

If you want the most efficient CSS then you should find the CSS theat needs changing and change it in it's css file so there is no need for overrides.

Originally Posted by juggledad

You should avoid making custom changes to any theme with the theme editor since the next time you update the theme the changes will be wiped out by the update process.

Absolutely! Hence Child themes etc.

What happened is that I activated the Jetpack plugin (to try out the post by email feature) and it's also added an "Edit CSS" option within the wordpress dashboard (separate from the theme editor)- which is what I've been using. I thought it was a new feature of WP 3.5.1.... I guess this is a similar feature to the Lazyest Stylesheet I mentioned above.

I shall de-activate that feature and shift my changes to clearfix.css as you suggested.

Thanks for your quick response.