With the more extensive use of hooks in 2.1 does this (finally) mean that mods wont actually need to change theme files?

In 2.0.x if a theme was added then often all the mods had to be uninstalled first then reinstalled after adding the theme, so each installed theme would have the relevant mods applied to it.

I'm hoping things have gotten easier in this regard.

Good Question mate, I never really understood what 'Hooks' do TBH

This is all left up to mod authors. If they use the hook system than no file changes will be applied. If they don't then there will be manual edits to do.

@lesmond Hooks allow mod authors to make mods that only hook into certain areas of the SMF core code. This means no file changes to core code so themes and other mods won't conflict with each other. So instead of a mod injecting code into the core of SMF and changing the code around, all the mod's code is contained within files that the mod drops off on the server. I think that makes sense, lol.

Quote from: Bigguy on Aug 16, 2021, 06:33 AM@lesmond Hooks allow mod authors to make mods that only hook into certain areas of the SMF core code. This means no file changes to core code so themes and other mods won't conflict with each other. So instead of a mod injecting code into the core of SMF and changing the code around, all the mod's code is contained within files that the mod drops off on the server. I think that makes sense, lol.

   

I'm sure there is a little more to it than that but that's the basics of it I guess.

While there have been hundreds of added hooks to 2.1, most of them are on the backend. Some of them do improve hooking into templates, but not enough to make it so that mods don't need to change template files.

tldr; many mods that change the UI in a way will most likely still change files. Some of those mods could switch to using certain hooks to avoid that, but I reckon not many will.