It looks like I needed to deactivate and activate the theme again before it would reread the manifest.cfg. So now the theme works and gets the portal_url as defined in the manifest.cfg
We have a similar bug on one of our customers, just with that site we need to deactivate / activate to look the changes on rules.xml, with the others sites it reads rules.xml on the fly without need to do this.
I didn't had time to figure out what happened, but I'll look forward to undestand with this thread.
@pigeonflight the clear cache button is on top of having to activate/deactivate themes when they're in production. The caching can make it appear as if your change (even with deactivating and reactivating a theme) hasn't take effect.
@tkimnguyen,
My scenario was as follows. I installed the theme, then added a new variable to the manifest.cfg. Then I cleared the cache with the "clear cache" button. But this was not enough for the system to reread the manifest.cfg and detect/register the new variable. I know this because a rule that relied on the variable did not work.
Once I deactivated and reactivated the theme the new variable then worked and was available to my diazo rule.
update... just re-reading what you said above, I now understand that you were explaining that the clear cache doesn't necessarily have the same effect as an activate/deactivate.