Hi all,

Is there a nice way to customize social office look and feel?

Obviously one can modify(?) so-theme but I couldn't find a way to select different theme for my site.

I'm asking this because most of our clients have requested a possibility to make look and feel in line with web pages and other marketing stuff...


- Lari

Hi Lari,

Unfortunately, changing so-theme is the only way to do it. We locked down the ability to deploy a theme because the majority of (most likely all) of the portal themes would be incompatible with the way we do a few things in SO.

Ryan,

Are we planning to have different themes in a deploy-able way in our further releases?
any Idea on that?

Because we need to have some other alternative for theme creation.

Thanks,

Tarun Kayasth

Thanks for the answer Ryan!

Do you have any idea on how much so-theme will change in the future? Basically the question is that if I make some modifications to the currrent theme, will I be forced to make the same modifications again after so version update?

- Lari

Hi,

I throw a propose to around theme problem:

edit only /so-theme/templates/portal_normal.vm to include cascading others custom css after istruction "$theme.include($top_head_include)"; for example to switch including others css, could be variables define in init_custom.vm (where there are no big problem of override from future release of SO).

I know this is not a new theme, but only some different css version, but for most clients change colors and some behaviuors (float, width, margins, etc..) is enough.

What do you think about this workaround ?

Bolzan

Thanks for the good point Marco!

Unfortunately changing css is often not enough but addition of different html elements and velocity variables is needed as well (or at least have been in multiple themes, I've written during the past years). Sometimes after the version update I've seen that vm files have also changed quite a bit and thus I'm somewhat unwilling to make these changes before I know what will happen with the theme in the future.....

- Lari

I don't believe there will be many modifications with this current version. My suggestion for now would be to add another "include" line in the main.css at the very end and keep your changes there. I think this will make maintainability easier for you until we find a permanent solution for theming Social Office.