Create a New Theme

The default uPortal desktop theme is named universality and located in uportal-war/src/main/resources/layout/theme. If you would like to create a new theme the recommended method is to create a copy of universality and then modify it to meet your needs. An entry also needs to be added to the database to enable your new theme.

Step 1: Create the theme directory

• Create a new theme directory under uportal-war/src/main/resources/layout/theme and ensure there is a .sdf file describing your theme. The recommended approach here is to simply copy the universality theme and then modify it to fit your needs.

Step 2: Register the theme

• To register your new theme in the database, create a .stylesheet-descriptor.xml entity file. You may wish to use the entity file for the universality theme as an example: uportal-warl/src/main/data/required_entities/stylesheet-descriptor/DLMXHTML.stylesheet-descriptor.xml

• To import the .theme file to the database run:

  ant data-import -Dfile=/full/path/to/mynewtheme.theme
  

Step 3: Configure User Profiles

• If you are starting with an empty database you simply need to edit the .layout and .fragment-layout files so that the <theme name=""> entry in the <profile> section matches the name in your .theme file.
• If you have existing users you will need to run SQL to update their profiles to point to the ID of the theme you imported via the .theme file.

Step 4: Create a skin directory

• Skins for the new theme should be made available at uportal-war/src/main/webapp/media/skins/<theme name>. It's generally advisable to copy the existing universality (or applicable other distributed theme) directory as a starting point.

Step 5: Add the skin directory to the maven build

Open uportal-war/pom.xml and find the resource server plugin configuration under the build section.  You will need to add an additional execution referencing your new theme directory.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.jasig.resourceserver</groupId>
    <artifactId>resource-server-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${resource-server.version}</version>
    <executions>
        . . .
        <execution>
            <id>aggregate-themename-skins</id>
            <phase>prepare-package</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>batch-aggregate</goal>
            </goals>
            <inherited>false</inherited>
            <configuration>
                <displayJsWarnings>false</displayJsWarnings>
                <includes>
                    <include>media/skins/themename/**/skin.xml</include>
                </includes>
                <sharedJavaScriptDirectory>media/skins/themename/common/javascript</sharedJavaScriptDirectory>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

Step 6: Rebuild/Redeploy uPortal

ant clean deploy-war

Step 7: Restart Tomcat

Restart your tomcat container to activate the change