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Administering Connections 7.0
Welcome to the HCL Connections documentation site. 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 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 the Hikari theme
Customize the default Hikari theme in HCL Connections™.

Administering Connections 7.0
Welcome to the HCL Connections documentation site. 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 Connections
  To install HCL Connections™, you need to follow a detailed series of procedures.
- Installing or upgrading Component Pack for Connections
  HCL Connections 7.0 now supports the latest Component Pack based in Harbor, an open-source container and Helm registry hosted by HCL for the Component Pack build. Deployments that are new or carrying Component Pack 7 will use this approach for a simplified installation/upgrade process, while releases prior to 7.0 will first need to upgrade to Component Pack 7 using a zip file and a local Docker registry.
- Post-installation tasks
  After installation, you need to perform further tasks to ensure an efficient deployment.
- Optional: Installing and configuring Tiny Editors for HCL Connections
  The Tiny editors are alternative rich-text editors which can be installed for HCL Connections™. They provide additional features and extensive customization options not available with the default editor.
- Optional post-installation tasks
  Complete the post-installation tasks that are relevant to your deployment.
- Uninstalling
  Uninstall HCL Connections.
- Upgrading and updating
  Upgrade HCL Connections and its supporting software to the latest release and then update the installation with the latest interim fixes or cumulative fixes. Refer to the What's New in HCL Connections to review the features in the latest release and gather download links or links to the latest fix list and update strategy information.
- 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.
    - Determining where to save your customizations
      When you are customizing HCL Connections™, save your customized files to the appropriate directory to ensure that your customizations override the default settings.
    - Enabling live user interface customization editing mode
      You can force applications to reload override files every time a browser request is made. This capability shows your customization changes in the product instantly.
    - Customizing the navigation bar
      You can edit the files that control the content of the HCL Connections™ navigation bar to add to the bar's functionality. For example, you can add extra links to the navigation bar, remove the Log Out link, or insert extra drop-down menus.
    - Adding an Important To Me bar to a Connections component
      Use an iframe to add an Important to Me (ITM) bar to any Connections component.
    - Customizing images
      You can update the images used in HCL Connections™ to suit the needs of your organization. For example, you can replace the IBM® logo with your company logo, or customize the sprited images and file type icons that are used in the product interface to fit with your company's branding.
    - Adding styles to the HCL Connections™ style sheet
      You can customize the look of the HCL Connections™ pages by adding new style definitions in the cascading style sheet and applying that style to different parts of the product user interface.
    - Making extensive color and style changes
      Edit the defaultTheme.css file to change the look of the user interface, such as changing the font style or background color.
    - Customizing the login page
      Customize the login page in HCL Connections™ to have the appropriate style and content for your organization.
    - Customizing the footer
      You can edit the files that control the content of the HCL Connections™ footer to improve the footer's functionality.
    - Customizing the error page
      Customize the text on the error page in HCL Connections™.
    - Customizing the Getting Started view
      Help your users get started with your implementation of HCL Connections™ by customizing the Getting Started view that is displayed in the Home page.
    - Customizing product strings
      You can replace a word or phrase in the product user interface with terminology that better suits your environment.
    - Overriding and extending JavaScript™ in HCL Connections™
      HCL Connections supports a mechanism that allows you to override or extend the JavaScript™ that is used in the different applications.
    - Extending JSP files with custom tags
      You can extend HCL Connections™ by adding your own custom JSTL tags to meet your company's needs.
    - Customizing the Application Access and Access Request interfaces
      You can customize the header, footer, login, and error pages that prompt HCL Connections users to grant/deny and revoke access to their Connections data for third-party applications protected by OAuth. Also, you can edit the text strings that display on the Application Access and Access Request interfaces.
    - Embedding Connections in an IFrame
      You can customize HCL Connections to be embedded in an IFrame.
    - Customizing the Hikari theme
      Customize the default Hikari theme in HCL Connections™.
  - 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.
  - 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 HCL products, including HCL Connections™.

Customizing the Hikari theme

Customize the default Hikari theme in HCL Connections™.

Procedure

To customize the Hikari theme, place the files that are shown under these directories.

To override the theme, place your styles into these files:

<CONNECTIONS_CUSTOMIZATION_PATH>/themes/HikariTheme/defaultTheme.css 
<CONNECTIONS_CUSTOMIZATION_PATH>/themes/HikariTheme/defaultThemeRTL.css

To add new styles to the theme, place your styles into these files:

<CONNECTIONS_CUSTOMIZATION_PATH>/themes/HikariTheme/custom.css
<CONNECTIONS_CUSTOMIZATION_PATH>/themes/HikariTheme/customRTL.css

To override the application styles, place your styles into these files:

<CONNECTIONS_CUSTOMIZATION_PATH>/themes/HikariTheme/applications/activities.css
<CONNECTIONS_CUSTOMIZATION_PATH>/themes/HikariTheme/applications/activitiesRTL.css
.
.
.
<CONNECTIONS_CUSTOMIZATION_PATH>/themes/HikariTheme/applications/wikis.css
<CONNECTIONS_CUSTOMIZATION_PATH>/themes/HikariTheme/applications/wikisRTL.css

Note: The Hikari theme does not support bidirectional (bidi) languages. However, you can add right-to-left (RTL) styles through customization.

To customize image.png referenced in the following example rule:

.lotusui30.lotusMain { 
                  background-image: url(path/to/image.png);
}

Place a custom copy in the folder:

<CONNECTIONS_CUSTOMIZATION_PATH>/javascript/com/ibm/social/hikari/theme/css/
defaultTheme/path/to/image.png

Note: HCL Connections™ parses the stylesheet, and resolves URLs of resources that are linked using url() CSS properties by rebasing them. In the example, Connections parses and rebases this as:

.lotusui30 .lotusMain { 
                   background-image: url("/connections/resources/web/com.ibm.social.hikari.theme/css/
defaultTheme/path/to/image.png?etag=<version_stamp>");
}

Results

The Hikari theme is customized.

What to do next

If you want to link to resources external to Connections in your stylesheet, and not have Connections rebase the paths, see: IFIX FOR APAR LO78594 for details.