Creating a New Skin

Owned by Jen Bourey
Last updated: Jun 14, 2010Version comment

Creating New Skins

New skins can easily be made and added to uPortal. Creating a new skin requires the following steps:

  1. Create a new skin folder structure under uportal-war/src/main/webapp/media/skins/universality (The uportal3 skin makes a good reference)
  2. Add your skin to uportal-war/src/main/webapp/media/skins/universality/skinList.xml
  3. Make new and/or override the default Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) files
  4. Modify and add graphics
  5. Redeploy the portal.

Creating a CSS File

uPortal uses a cascading style sheet to control the text fonts and styles, as well as the background color scheme information. Each skin uses a single style sheet for all of its styles. The styles defined in the new CSS will be translated into the look of the uPortal layout when that skin is chosen.

A number of standard styles are used throughout uPortal, within channels, and defined in the Portlet Spec.

Setting the Default Skin

The default skin is defined in the database in the UP_SS_THEME_PARM table.  Just modify the PARAM_DEFAULT_VALUE to your skin's name.  This row is populated by the  uportal-impl/src/main/resources/properties/db/entities/theme/DLM_XHTML-1.theme, which you can modify to set this parameter in the database when initdb is run.