Custom share themes via a JAR file

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chrisokelly

Hi guys,

I am a little lost here, I am attempting to customize the look and feel of Alfresco, community version 4.0.b. It is installed via web quick start on a Ubuntu server and running with Postgres DB in a Tomcat environment. I need to use a Jar file to do this, rather than simply editing files in the webapp directory so that future updates will not be as much of an issue for us.

I have read through Alfresco 3 Business Solutions from packtpub (specifically chapter 3 dealing with development environments), http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Share#Themes, the alfresco 4.0 documentation and a good few web tutorials (http://blogs.alfresco.com/wp/mikeh/2010/11/26/install-new-share-theme-via-jar-file/ being the most recent) and just do not seem to be getting anywhere at all. apart from the alfresco 4.0.b documentation and wiki these are obviously a little dated, so I accept that may be part of it. Unfortunately the wiki recommends I edit the files directly (which is not applicable in our case) and the documentation does the same. Part of the confusion is that when it comes to the development environment, each of these sources suggests a different directory structure designed specifically for their own tutorials or sample files, which only works with their specific build.xml file (and these tend to be designed for more complex extensions than skinning).

What I have at the moment is as follows -

customtheme
|-alfresco
  |-site-data
    |-themes
      |-customtheme.xml
|-META-INF
  |-themes
    |-customtheme
      |-images
      |-yui
      |-login.css
      |-presentation.css
‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

I have replaced the instances of the theme name in presentation.css, and yui/assets/skin.css, I have a <title> and <title-id> in customtheme.xml. I jar it up using

jar -cvf customtheme.jar customtheme/ ‍

from one level above the top customtheme directory successfully.
I move the resulting .jar into the alfresco directory. Based on my original finding I was starting by putting it in tomcat/webapps/share/WEB-INF/lib but after reading some different tutorials I have put it in tomcat/shared/lib. I restart alfresco after each time I move it to any location.
The theme does not show up in the application admin console, though the out of the box ones show up and can be changed between with no issue. I can add ?theme=customtheme to the end of the URL and when I inspect the page in firrebug I can see it is aiming to get classnames and such from yui-skin-customtheme however it does not appear to find them, the page loads without formatting and any images still appear to attempt to load from /share/res/themes/default/images/.
As we are using Tomcat 6 I have checked that Tomcat is set up as per http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Install_Tomcat6 (it already seemed to be, I am guessing courtesy of web quick start, all I did was mkdir the /shared/lib directory). I have seen some info about modifying share-config-custom.xml to change the default theme but I believe this is not necessary for newer versions with the ability to choose the theme in the admin menu? I am confident this is not a conflict with any other extensions, as we have not added any. The only modifications made from OOB are to change the authentication chain and set up SSL and SSO (all of which are working fine now). Each time I have tested the jar file and found no change I have removed the jar file to prevent them from causing problems down the track.

Feeling kind of stupid for being so stuck by a simple skinning issue, have I missed something obvious here? This is my first time working with Alfresco, I am more used to wordpress and phpBB but I have gotten my foot into the enterprise door now.

bengrah

Hi chrisokelly,

Please check out Mike Hatfield's post on the same thing, I'm sure this will help you: http://blogs.alfresco.com/wp/mikeh/

Cheers,
bengrah