Customizing Lotus Connections 3.0

Overall, the process of changing Lotus Connections is easier

1. Deploying changes to markup or style sheets is easier.  If you are really familiar with style sheets, CSS is the way to go to change your look and feel.
2. There is a new getting started page on the homepage
3. The header and footer now support JSP logic. It’s easy to add new menus or links to the header
4. The login in page is shared by all applications now and can be easily customized
5. Most text in the UI is replaceable
6. Themes for communities are easier to deploy and manage
7. Daily and weekly email digests (part of the Following feature) can be changed

What hasn’t changes much?

1. Customizing profiles is very similar to 2.5
2. Changing the business card
3. Adding custom widgets to the homepage, profiles, or communities.  It’s a simple UI to place the widgets
4. Defining custom languages for users to choose from
5. Blog customization

Who can change what?

1. Administrator who can configure Connections to match org. He or she also maintains the installation and works with the developer on changes.
2. Designers who will produce images and aesthetic guidance
3. Web Developer who will implement the html/css  and customize the JSP’s.  He or she will also update customization with fixpacks.

What didn’t work previously?

1. Visual styling hard to change globally
2. Other customizations (code) required changes that would be wiped out with fix packs
3. Login page was all over the place and hard to change

More detail:

There is now a customization directory where you can specify a custom header, footer etc.  Go to Infocenter and copy the original file to the customization directory.  It’s still very developer driven but it’s now easy to manage the customization. Once it’s in the diretory, Lotus Connections is smart enough to recognize it.  Note: caching is in place so it may or probably will require a restart.  Don’t forget to clear the browser cache or change the version stamp.

They also have application specific customization directories which override the common customization directory. So if you just want to change the profiles page without changing everything else, you can do that.

You can turn on customization debug mode and restart the server. The presenter highly suggests that you do this on a non-production server.  That’s good common sense advice.  Note, you turn debug mode on and it will perform poorly.

Choosing a Global Software Development Partner to Accelerate Your Digital Strategy

To be successful and outpace the competition, you need a software development partner that excels in exactly the type of digital projects you are now faced with accelerating, and in the most cost effective and optimized way possible.

Get the Guide

Tip: don’t change defaultTheme.css.   Create an empty custom.css file in the theme directory and all your changes will be appended to the css.  However, if you are making extensive changes, then alter defaultTheme.css instead.

How to change the logo: create a new logo image called toolbar_logo.gif and copy it to the right location.  Edit custom.css to make sure the logo aligns correctly, etc.  save the changes, clear the cache and go.  Remember that any change you make in the common directory will be a global change.

What happens when you want custom links like a support forum?  You find the header.jsp file and copy it to the customization directory. It will still be the header.jsp file.  You would also find header menu file and copy it to the common customization directory WITH a new name.  Change the jsp and save your changes.

What about the login page? Also easy to change.  Change the correct JSP.  They showed some substantial changes. Note: be careful because some of the logic you may not want to change.  Always have a backup.

How do you change product text:  I won’t go into extreme detail but it involves unzipping the JAR file, creating a new file, copy the strings you want to change to the new customization file and then change the product text. Note: this changes the product text for ALL languages.

Best Practices

• Only copy the files you need into the customization directory
• Keep track of the changes you make through documentation or comments
• Use custom.css whenver possible. It’s easier to track your style changes and handle migration
• Back up frequently and have a process around deploying customization.  Don’t forget a test or stage server is key.
• When you are ready to deploy, always update the version stamp.

Best practices maintaining

If there is a fixpack, you will have some work to do.

• backup your customization directory
• disable all customziation
• apply the fixplack
• test the fix
• identify any files changes in the fixpack and do a compare
• rename your customization files and reapply

Best Practices Debugging

• Use the customization debug mode
• If you don’t see changes then check that the file is in the right location, clear your browser cache, retart the app or the server.
• Printing the list of customized filed. Always the possibility that your change may introduce a syntax error. Enable Websphere trace, restart the connections app, check your trace log.

Super Secret Developer Tricks

• User Firebug to find out what style rules are being used where.  You will need to install Firebug on Firefox.  You then just find the visual element, right click the element and choose inspect element.
• Use Stylish to mimic changing custom.css.  It’s another short cut to check out the changes first before putting it into custom.css and deploying
• Note: a lot of style sheet lines are specifically there to fix issues with IE.  So your changes may introduce errors in IE.  Be sure to test

Migrating from 2.5 to 3.0

Style rules have changes, especially those that affect colr and borders.  If you added css files via the header then copy the content into the common customization directory.

You can change other things in Connections 3.0