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Custom themes advanced topics

Here you can find how to build advanced custom themes that add or change CSS classes, map your themes to specific parts of the UI, and change the structure of UI pages.

warning

We strongly recommend that you use the out-of-the-box Theming Tool whenever possible due to upgrade risks when using Soy or FreeMarker themes. Alternatively, you can engage our professional service team to help you develop a custom theme if you don't want to do it yourself. Ask your Jive Software account representative about this service. For more information about the Theming Tool, see Theming community.

You need to be comfortable working with FreeMarker and Soy templates. Depending on what you do, you might also need to get a more thorough understanding on how the application is structured; editing one file sometimes requires knowing how a few others work, too.

  • Creating custom CSS classes You can customize your community's CSS by adding or overriding CSS classes in a custom CSS FTL template file. You create a theme, create the custom template, add your CSS classes to the template, then map the theme to the UI.

  • Customizing UI page structure You can change the structure of a page by customizing the /template file that the page is rendered from.

  • Assigning global styling You can assign your custom theme to the UI application-wide.

  • Mapping custom themes to UI You use scope to map your custom themes to the UI so you can test your changes. Without this mapping, it won't be possible to really see how things are shaping up. The scope decisions are built on your design goals.

  • Simple phrase substitution in UI You can give other names to things users see in the user interface. By using the Admin Console, you can make the substitutions in a simple way for the most common terms.

  • Advanced phrase substitution in UI This topic describes how to make advanced phrase substitutions.

  • FTL templates and descriptions reference Here's a list of the FTL files you can customize when creating your custom theme. Each FTL file corresponds to a part of the user interface.

  • FTL file changes New versions of Jive often include changes to FreeMarker (FTL) files that make up the application's user interface. These changes are usually made to support new features or feature enhancements.

  • SOY file changes New versions of Jive often include changes to SOY files that make up the application's user interface. These changes are usually made to support new features or feature enhancements.

  • Custom themes: Frequently asked questions Here you can answers for some question about developing custom themes for Jive.

  • Custom themes: Other resources This topic includes links to other information about technologies related to themes.

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Developing custom themes