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Developing themes and skins

You can create themes using modules to contribute to separate areas of pages to provide flexibility, enhance the user experience, and maximize performance. To optimize themes on your website, use the theme optimization module framework. The framework separates feature-specific logic and capabilities from the theme code.

  • Roadmap: Creating and customizing themes
    Theme creation and customization are easy when you use the Theme Manager and download your static theme files by using a WebDAV client. This roadmap provides an overview of the theme creation and customization process. Links to detailed instructions for each step are provided in the roadmap.
  • Getting started with Themes
    Before you begin to develop themes, learn about the resources and the tools you can leverage to create and customize them.
  • The module framework
    The module framework allows extensions to contribute to different areas of a page to provide flexibility, enhance the user experience, and maximize performance.
  • Understanding the Simple Theme
    With the Simple Theme, you can create, copy, and customize themes in minutes with just a few clicks and far fewer files than the Portal 8.5 theme.
  • Understanding the Portal 8.5 modularized theme
    Modern websites and browsers enable incredible new capabilities that can greatly enhance your user's web experiences. However, these capabilities are not without cost in terms of large page sizes and more processing in the browser when each page is rendered. These capabilities are worth it when you need them, but removing them for an entire site or including them only on pages that take advantage of these capabilities provides for more flexibility.
  • Customizing the theme
    The module framework allows themes to be customized in order to provide flexibility, enhance the user experience, and maximize performance.
  • Developing themes for a production portal
    Use the theme artifacts to package a theme for staging to production.
  • Device classes
    Device classes are used in HCL Digital Experience as an abstraction for common properties for the device of a client. For instance, tablet computers can be grouped into a device class tablets, since they share a form factor and possibly other traits such as touch interface, or additional hardware sensors.
  • Responsive Web Design
    Responsive Web Design provides content parity between mobile devices and desktop channels, which enhances user experience and brand consistency. Seamless changes in screen size, from small to large, are now possible while the order of the content is maintained. Content maintenance is simplified by having one site that is represented by one set of assets.
  • Directory structure
    The topic shows the naming conventions that are used to denote the location of files on the servers and the types of resources you can find in those directories.

HCLSoftware U learning materials

For an introduction and a demo on how to use themes, go to Theme. To try it out yourself, refer to Theme Development Lab and corresponding Theme Development Lab Resources.

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