Customizing a blog theme

Customize a blog theme to change the look of a blog. Or create a new theme and make it available to your blog users.

The theme for a blog controls the look and the layout of the blog. You can customize the theme for a blog to change the look of it by editing the templates files that make up the theme. For example, you might add a corporate logo or change the background color for a theme. You should be comfortable editing HTML files and cascading style sheets (CSS files) to modify a blog theme. Also note the following:

To make a site-wide change, edit the Blogs Homepage theme.
You can extend a theme so it can use a different color scheme or different content but use the same templates.
You can create a new theme based on an existing theme and add it to the list of available themes that your users can choose.

CAUTION: The ability for blog owners to customize their blog themes is disabled by default. Although the setting to enable this application is on the Configurations page on the Administration tab, we strongly recommend you do not enable it, because end-user theme customization is not a supported application. User-customized theme migration will be the customer's responsibility for future releases. The setting is provided to be compatible with the IBM® Connections 1.x releases. If your end users customized themes in an earlier release, enable this application so they can retrieve their customized themes.

Note: If you customized blog themes in a previous release of IBM Connections, there is no migration path provided for importing your changes into IBM Connections 4. Before upgrading to IBM Connections 4, ensure that you review and make a note of your existing customizations to blog themes so you can verify them post-migration and rework if necessary.

The following topics describe how to access and modify the templates for a theme and how to make a new theme available for use.