tl;dr Putting config files in a folder under /App_Config/Include causes them to be patched in last.

Following an answer by @Bruud on Stackflow a few months ago I found out that it is possible to organise patch config files much more neatly. It was also mentioned as a passing comment on one of the recent Google Hangout highlighting the changes in Sitecore 7.X.

I’ve just started working on a few project from existing vendors and noticed the common patch file naming convention to ensure custom changes are applied after the standard Sitecore configs in App_Config/Include, e.g. xCustomSitecore.config and zCustomSitecore.config

It turns out that you can simply put your custom configs in a child folder and Sitecore will include them after any files in /App_Config/Include.

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