Decorator and Theme Customization

Now that your custom Jetspeed portal is up and running, let's start customizing the portal design. The portal design, or skins, are known in Jetspeed as decorators and themes. With decorators and themes, you can customize the portal experience to the branding of your organization. In this tutorial, we will simply change a few images, CSS styles and colors to get you on your way.

It is important to note that all of the changes made in this section are made in the build environment. The changes we are making here could just as easily be made using the portal's live customization features. For example, you can drop a decorator or theme into the portal while its running. Jetspeed will pick it up automatically. Or, to customize a page, you can use the portlet customizer or desktop customizer, portlet selector, and site manager: all administrative portlets that work on your live portal. However, the point of configuring everything in a Maven build is to be able to easily reproduce portal environments for development, testing, and new deployments.

This section of the tutorial covers customizing:

  • Portal Skins (or Decorators). We replace the default logo, colors, and page header and footers with our own.
  • Portal Themes. Same as Portal Skins, but themes apply to the Jetspeed Desktop.
  • Configuring the default portal page to use these new decorators and themes