Themes Development in WebSphere Portal 8.5

Developing New Theme Skin modules in Websphere Portal 8.5

To develop new Themes/Skins in IBM Websphere Portal 8.5 you need the following.

1.      IBM WebSphere Portal 8.5

2.      IBM Rational Application Developer (RAD) 8 or above / IBM Rational Software Architect.

3.      WebDAV Client (not mandatory but good to have)

The steps mentioned below are required to be followed to develop a new Them in

IBM WebSphere Portal 8.5. 

Theme Resources

To set up the custom theme in an EAR file we need to retrieve the source from the shipped theme.

We need two kind of resources for this:

           

           1.   Dynamic resources               

            2.   Static resources

Dynamic Resources: Copy the following folders to your own folder

Location: /WebSphere/PortalServer/theme/wp.theme.themes/default85/installedApps/DefaultTheme85.ear/DefaultTheme85.war

Folders to copy

     ·         skins

     ·         themes

     ·         WEB-INF/decorations.xml

     ·         WEB-INF/tld/*

Static Resources: To retrieve the static resources we need to retrieve the content through the browser, using the following URLs:

Themes – http://<<HostName>>/wps/mycontenthandler/dav/fs-type1/themes/?mime-type=application/zip

Skins – http://<<HostName>>/wps/mycontenthandler/dav/skinlist/?mime-type=application/zip

Common Resources –

http://<<HostName>>/wps/mycontenthandler/dav/fs-type1/common-resources/?mime-type=application/zip

Unpack the ZIP files and save them to a temporary folder.

When common-resources are unzipped, the folder is named only “ibm”. Move the folder “ibm” into a newly created folder with the name “common-resources”.

Some sample screenshots are shown below: