I am new here and to OctoberCMS so maybe I'm misunderstanding something, or, doing it all wrong :)

From reading the documentation it looks like the theme directory isn't really just the theme, it's the whole website, content, and all.

It seems like the content pages should be separate from themes? That way you could possibly change between themes and maintain the same content, etc. It would allow you to test a new theme you're developing and if it's not right just switch back to your stable theme.

Also having separate possible "content" or "application" folders would be nice. You could have a production version but copy that into a test folder, make some major changes, set that to your "live" content and if there's a major error you could easily switch back to the previous production content.

Maybe that's how everything already works and I misunderstood or maybe my idea is faulty and there's a better way to deal with these things?

Thanks :)

From reading the documentation it looks like the theme directory isn't really just the theme, it's the whole website, content, and all.

I am rather new to October as well, but yes, this is essentially true. The theme contains the pages, the layout(s) and the theme's frontend partials.

It seems like the content pages should be separate from themes? That way you could possibly change between themes and maintain the same content, etc. It would allow you to test a new theme you're developing and if it's not right just switch back to your stable theme.

Well, you can easily switch themes... but you will have to copy pages, layout and partials over to the new theme. And possibly make adjustments, because a custom theme may not load the same js, css, framework etc. It seems to be wise to select a theme first and then start to do the heavy custom work on your pages.

Also having separate possible "content" or "application" folders would be nice. You could have a production version but copy that into a test folder, make some major changes, set that to your "live" content and if there's a major error you could easily switch back to the previous production content.

Again, I am not a pro, but I am having difficulties imagining how this could work. This may be due to the lack of imagination and/or skills however. You have two maybe three major tools that help greatly revert to a previous state: Backup, naturally, and for the database structure and content, the migration. As it was possible with Laravel to have a config for local and live production, I assume that something similar can be done with October, but I have not come this yet. Somebody more experienced may elaborate on this topic.

Maybe that's how everything already works and I misunderstood or maybe my idea is faulty and there's a better way to deal with these things?

It depends, if you are a heavy HTML web designer and produce only static pages, then it may be difficult to work with October. But if you do most of your work with PHP, then you will do this with plugins (that contains one or more components/widgets) and those are essentially independent of the respective theme.

Maybe you could also provide a practical example to illustrate what you would like to achieve?

Last updated 8 years ago