vB4 What's the safest way to make structural changes to the site?

[محروم.كوم]

I'm in need of some customizations for my site, and since I find myself not too trustworthy of many of the available mods, plugins, and hacks, I'd like to do this myself. At the same time, I need to be able to trust that what I'm doing is appropriate and future proof as well.

I've recently made a change to the template forumhome_forumbit_level2_pos. I've simply added a couple of lines of code that references some changes that are reflected in additional.css. I'm not concerned with additional.css at all. I started thinking about this very small code change and how it may be affected with future upgrades produced by vB. Is it a good idea to ever make changes to a template in the fashion that I have described? Is there a method of changing the structure in an area of the site without modifying the template? In otherwords, something that overrides the template's code for the change, but not actually modifying the template itself?


Maybe I'm asking way too much when the simpler question is, what's the safest way to make structural changes to the site? While I fully document all my changes in my own change log, going too deep down this path may cause more regret than I'm willing to tolerate.

Any advice would be great, thanks. __DEFINE_LIKE_SHARE__