Two Templates We Pulled Back Into Version Control
macca and mono got into the template gallery without ever passing through the reviewed files. In August 2026 we pulled them back out of the live database and fixed that — without changing anything a visitor sees.
In August 2026, two templates in the gallery — macca and mono — had a problem nobody had actually noticed as a problem: they'd been approved into the live database without ever passing through the reviewed template files the rest of the hand-built set lives in. They worked fine. Visitors using them saw nothing wrong. But they existed only as rows in a website_templates D1 table, with none of the version history, diffs, or review trail that the other hand-built templates get by living in the repository.
We pulled both back into version control.
What that actually involved
Bringing a template "back into version control" here didn't mean rebuilding it from scratch and hoping the result matched. It meant taking what was already live in the database and writing it into the repository as a proper file — the same treatment the other 15 hand-built starters get.
Doing that surfaced two schema quirks specific to these two templates: a color_scheme field stored as prose (a sentence describing the palette, rather than the structured format the other templates use) and a tags field shaped differently than everywhere else. Both were artifacts of however macca and mono originally got created outside the normal file-based path.
The decision that made this worth writing about
The obvious engineering instinct is to "fix" both quirks while you're in there — normalize the color scheme field, reshape the tags to match everyone else's format. We deliberately didn't. Both quirks were left as-is, specifically so that bringing these two templates under version control changed nothing a visitor to a site built on macca or mono would ever see. The goal of the exercise was traceability, not a cleanup pass, and conflating the two would have meant shipping a behavior change disguised as a paperwork fix.
Why this is worth telling you at all
It's a small, unglamorous fact about two templates out of hundreds. But it's a more honest signal about how the template system is actually maintained than a marketing line about "500 curated templates" would be. Templates can drift outside the reviewed path — that happened here — and when it's caught, the fix is to bring them back in line rather than pretend it didn't happen. That's the standard we'd want applied to anything in the gallery, and macca and mono are the concrete proof it gets applied in practice.