The static asset cache-buster in base.html was using
{{ request.timestamp|default:'1.0' }} — but `request.timestamp` is
not a Django request attribute, so the template always fell back to
the literal '1.0'. Every deploy's CSS URL resolved to the same
`custom.css?v=1.0`, so any CDN or browser cache in front of the app
held onto the pre-redesign CSS forever — even hard refreshes in
incognito couldn't bust it.
Symptom: after deploying the redesigned app, the browser continued
to receive a 1,734-byte pre-redesign custom.css while the VM's
/static/css/custom.css was the full 39,078-byte Premium Orange Theme.
.topbar-nav rules were missing, so the topbar rendered as stacked
block links.
Fix: use `deployment_timestamp` (already provided by
core.context_processors.project_context as int(time.time()) at
render time). Every restart gets a fresh URL, CDNs refetch from
origin, stale caches break.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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