Customization Approaches

Portal themes may be customized using any of several approaches. Some features can be controlled by more than one approach. Best practice is to select the simplest method to modify the desired feature.

Portal theme configuration

Many features of a portal theme can be set in the administration user interface, after a portal theme has been associated to a portal. Only features that have been declared in the theme's config.xml can be modified in this way. Feature parameters that are set for a particular portal only affect the appearance of that theme in that portal. Other portals using the same theme are not affected.

To change the value of a parameterized feature in all uses of the theme, modify the theme's config.xml to set a different default.

Master template modification

Since Titania version 4.1, portal pages are defined by master templates (a TD Freemarker extension). The master templates can be easily modified, or the content of page regions may be modified, without any further Freemarker development.

Freemarker development

All portal content is generated by Freemarker templates, using the TD Freemarker extensions. Highly customized portal themes can be written using any Freemarker capability.

XSLT

XML content from the TD repository is transformed to HTML using XSLT. Portal theme developers can modify the built-in XSLT transformations or use new transformations to generate custom HTML.