Home
Administering Connections 6.5
Welcome to the HCL Connections 6.5 documentation. HCL Connections is social networking software designed for the workplace. Its features help you to establish dynamic networks that connect you to the people and information you need to achieve your business goals.
Customizing
Customize HCL Connections™ to fit your environment.
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.
Customizing a blog template
A blog theme is made from a collection of templates that control the look of the blog. You can customize theme templates and save a new theme for a blog.

Administering Connections 6.5
Welcome to the HCL Connections 6.5 documentation. HCL Connections is social networking software designed for the workplace. Its features help you to establish dynamic networks that connect you to the people and information you need to achieve your business goals.
- What's new in HCL Connections
  Find out about features that are new or updated in this release of HCL Connections.
- Product overview
  Learn how to deploy, customize, and administer the HCL Connections social networking product.
- Planning
  Before installing HCL Connections™, study the system requirements, deployment options, and documentation conventions.
- Installing
  To install HCL Connections™, you need to follow a detailed series of procedures.
- Uninstalling HCL Connections
  Uninstall HCL Connections.
- Migrating and updating
  Migrate HCL Connections™ and its supporting software to the latest release and then update the installation with the latest deployment, interim fixes, or Cumulative Refresh (CR).
- Administering
  Run administration and maintenance tasks to keep your environment up-to-date. For example, learn how to customize your deployment or how to use the wsadmin utility to edit configuration files. You can also schedule tasks, maintain application databases, moderate content, or manage users and their roles.
- Customizing
  Customize HCL Connections™ to fit your environment.
  - Customization best practices
    Use the following guidelines to help you to implement and manage customizations in your deployment of HCL Connections™.
  - Injecting customizations into Connections pages
    HCL Connections™ Customizer is a proxy service that lets you modify the HCL Connections user experience. Customizer intercepts and modifies requests from clients and responses from servers, so it can customize anything that flows through it, such as the behavior of APIs or the look-and-feel of the user interface.
  - Customizing the user interface
    The procedure to customize HCL Connections™ is the same for each application. You must edit a copy of the relevant source file and save it in the appropriate customization directory.
  - Customizing notifications
    The content of the notifications sent by HCL Connections™ is defined in templates that are processed by the FreeMarker engine.
  - Adding new ways to share content
    Create your own gadgets and add them to the Share dialog.
  - 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.
    - Standard Blogs theme components
      A Blogs theme is made up of a collection of templates, graphics, and macros that you can modify. This topics describes some of the basic theme components.
    - Changing the theme used in a blog
      A theme controls the layout and color-scheme of your blog. When you create a new blog, you choose from one of the built-in themes.
    - Customizing a blog template
      A blog theme is made from a collection of templates that control the look of the blog. You can customize theme templates and save a new theme for a blog.
    - Example: Adding a logo to a blog theme
      Customize a theme by adding a logo to the design.
    - Extending a theme
      You can extend an existing theme to use a different color scheme or to display different content.
    - Making a custom theme available to your users
      You can create custom themes and make them available to your blog users. Customizing themes requires experience editing HTML and CSS files.
    - Deleting a Blogs theme
      Delete a Blogs theme if you do not want it to be available to your users.
  - Customizing Metrics reports
    Metrics data displays as reports, which you can customize for your organization. When you install IBM® Cognos® Business Intelligence to support the Metrics application, a set of standard reports is immediately available. You can customize the standard reports by editing the configuration file that defines each report’s layout. In addition, you can use IBM Cognos Report Studio to create new reports.
  - Customizing Profiles
    Customize the Profiles application to define the core data model for people within your deployment and tailor the presentation of profile content to meet your organization’s requirements.
  - Using Profiles and Communities business cards
    Extend your web application by integrating the Profiles and Communities business cards in to the application.
  - Customizing the Wikis welcome page
    Customize the welcome page of the Wikis application.
  - Post-customization step
    Edit a configuration property so users see your changes the next time they log in, without having to clear their web browser cache.
- Security
  HCL Connections™ provides a flexible security infrastructure that supports an open, easily shareable data model.
- Mobile
  See the HCL Connections™ Mobile documentation for Connections Cloud and Connections on-premises.
- Developing
  Get information about how to use the APIs provided with HCL Connections™ and how to use Connections Customizer to modify the Connections pages that are returned to users.
- Troubleshooting and support
  To isolate and resolve problems with your HCL products, you can use the troubleshooting and support information. This information contains instructions for using the problem-determination resources that are provided with your IBM® products, including HCL Connections™.

Customizing a blog template

A blog theme is made from a collection of templates that control the look of the blog. You can customize theme templates and save a new theme for a blog.

Before you begin

You must be a blog owner or administrator to edit blog templates.

Important: Blog-level customization is turned off by default. If you enable this feature and allow users to customize their blog templates, the end user is then responsible for updating the templates following a migration. Some customized templates may not work after migration.

About this task

You can edit the templates that define the layout, colors and fonts of your blog. Before you can edit the templates for the theme, you must choose to customize the theme. Customizing theme templates involves editing the source HTML for the template files. You should only do this if you are comfortable editing HTML files.

Restriction: Only modification to the HTML is supported. Do not change any calls that retrieve data from the blog system or your blog may fail to work.

Procedure

From the My Blogs page, click Settings for the blog you want to customize.
Note: If you are the Blogs site administrator and want to edit the theme for the Blogs home page, find the blog which serves as Blogs Homepage on the Site Settings section, on the Configuration page of the Administration tab. You can customize the theme for the home page in the same way you customize the theme for any blog.
Click Theme.
Choose the theme you want to customize and click Customize.
The templates for that theme are now available for you to edit from the Templates page. Note that the Customize button is only available if the Allow custom themes setting is enabled for the site.
Click Templates.
The templates for the current blog display.
Click Edit to modify a template.
See the examples for guidelines about how to make common customization changes.
Save changes you make to the template.
Click Remove to remove a template.
You cannot delete a required template.

Rate this topic

5 stars 4 stars 3 stars 2 stars 1 star

Comment on this topic.

By clicking this box, you acknowledge that you are NOT a U.S. Federal Government employee or agency, nor are you submitting information with respect to or on behalf of one. HCL provides software and services to U.S. Federal Government customers through its partners immixGroup, Inc. Contact this team at https://hcltechsw.com/resources/us-government-contact. Do not include any personal data in this Comment box. Note: To report a problem or question about the product software, do not use this form. Instead, go to the HCL Software Support site.