Reply To: Modifying buddypress.min.css
If you do nothing but activate BP then BP uses it’s version of buddypress styles from the minified file in BP’s core template directory, however if you overload that with your own copy of buddypress.css in the correct matching directory in your theme or child theme then BP will see that and use it instead (a normal non minified file). Don’t worry too much about script_debug it was/is a means of geting around an issue on development installs.
and isn’t it a downgrade in performance if the .min.css file is being lost to a custom .css file? Isn’t the point of the .min.css file to speed things up?
Yeah, essentially however the practise has never been one that was a mandatory one or even approved of by many older hands, css is a cached file, thus once downloaded the local cached copy is used, CSS is a text based declarative language and is intended to be human readable, removing white space renders a file uneditable/readable a possible issue if needing that file to edit and unminified version not available. Part of the experience and skill set of a good frontend coder working with CSS is knowing how to write rulesets correctly in a manner that doesn’t result in massive file bloat commonly seen nowadays with 50k+file sizes.
In answer, the speed increase is negligible but most will think that any saving is worth it *shrug*
