TLDR: This is my general process of modifying code from Github (or other) that I use (could be an Octopress theme or a cocoapod or any other open source code one might use), all while maintaining the ability to update and contributing back (sometimes)…

Recently I installed Octopress theme by Adrian Artiles, for this blog.
As suggested by Adrian using git submodule, in octopress .theme folder.
My first post was link-post (see Link Bloging). When checking out the preview of the blog with the new link post I noticed that the post title did not link to the external-url of the post…

Long story short I found what’s needed to be changed in the theme to make the post title link to external site.

At this point I do the following:

  1. Fork the project on Github.

  2. Change the submodule origin to the forked repo: 

     $ cd /submodule/path
 $ git remote set-url origin https://github.com/[your-user]/[forked-repo].git

  3. Add the original repo of the fork as upstream:

    cd /submodule/path  
git remote add upstream https://github.com/[user-forked-from]/[repo-forked-from].git

  4. Create a new branch in the submodule with the name of the change (I create a branch for each change that is applied).

  5. Apply the fix / change.

  6. Commit, Push.

  7. Pull request back to upstream.

To use all the changes done I sometimes create a beta branch and merge all the changes to there.

That way future updates are easy to do:

  1. Pull changes from upstream remote into (submu) master branch.
  2. Merge changes from master into your branches.