Defining themes

You can customize the appearance of a desktop by creating a theme with a color scheme and images that are specific to your organization. You can modify the banner, login page, navigation elements, and buttons.

About this task

The IBM® Content Navigator web client includes a default theme, a classic theme, and several predefined themes that you can use to change the appearance of your desktop. The predefined themes are based on the classic IBM Content Navigator theme. The predefined themes are:
  • Azurite
  • Cordierite
  • Malachite
  • Obsidian
  • Quartz

You can make a copy of a predefined theme to create your own customized theme, and you can apply different themes to different desktops.

For example, a service provider with several clients can create a desktop for each client company, applying a theme with a unique color palette and icons for each client company. Or, an administrator can create one desktop for users with edit access and another desktop for users with read-only access and apply customized themes for each.

Procedure

To define a theme:

  1. Open the administration tool in the web client.
  2. Either create a new theme by clicking Themes > New Theme or copy an existing theme by clicking Themes, selecting an existing theme, and clicking Copy.
  3. Specify the name for the theme.
    The name is used only to identify it in the administration tool.

    If the Default theme style is selected and you are creating a custom theme that is based on the classic theme, save the custom theme without changes to the theme settings.

  4. Specify a color palette for the theme.
    For each color, either enter the hexadecimal value that represents the color, such as #FFFFFF for white, or click the color circle to use the color picker.

    You can add as many colors as you want by clicking Add Color. As you add colors to the color palette, the colors are automatically added to the selection list for background color or text color.

  5. Specify the colors and images that you want to use for the application, login page, banner, navigation elements, and buttons.
    • For each element, you can select default or select a color from your color palette. If you select default for a text color, the color is determined by calculating the color value that is complementary to the background color.
    • For the product name in the banner, you can use the application name that is specified on the Appearance page of the desktop, or you can use a custom logo.
    • For the login page and banner, you can display the IBM logo, a custom logo, or no logo.
      Tip: If the logo is on the same web application server as the web client, enter a relative URL, for example: /mycustomizations/login_logo.png. The logo is not to be no larger than 200 pixels wide and 150 pixels high. It is recommended that the logo have a transparent background.
  6. Save your changes.

What to do next

After you create and save a theme, you can apply the theme to one or more desktops.
To apply a predefined theme to a desktop:
  1. Click Desktops. Select a desktop. Click Edit.
  2. On the Appearance page, from the Theme setting, select a theme from the list.
  3. Save your changes.