Customizing styles used in the Connections

You might want to customize the connections UI by changing the CSS styles, For example by default the lotus banner is black but i wanted to see if i can change it to red. I followed these steps to make the change.


  • I used the firebug to figure out what CSS class has the color definition for the banner and i figure that the lotusBanner defines the background color for the header


    .lotusBanner{
    padding:0 10px;
    background-color:#000000;
    background-image:-moz-linear-gradient(top, #525252 0%,#000000 100%);
    -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#525252), to(#000000));
    }

    I did search to find out which css file contains the definition for the lotusBanner css class and in case of Activities application E:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\installedApps\wpconnectionsCell01\Activities.ear\oawebui.war\nav\common\styles\defaultTheme\defaultTheme.css file defines the lotusBanner class


  • Then i did create a custom.css file under E:\IBM\LotusConnections\data\shared\customization\common\nav\common\styles\defaultTheme, (in my case E:\IBM\LotusConnections\data\shared\customization is lotus shared data directory) and i copied the lotusBanner class in it.

  • I made changes in the lotusBanner class to change value of background color from black to FireBrick red(B22222) so that my lotusBanner css style class looks like this

    .lotusBanner{
    padding:0 10px;
    background-color:#B22222;
    background-image:-moz-linear-gradient(top, #525252 0%,#B22222 100%);
    -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#525252), to(#B22222));
    }



After saving my changes i did cleanup my browser cache and when i refreshed the page again i could see the banner being rendered in red like this.

2 comments:

  1. I used firebug to create a custom.css file for Connections 3.0.1. It took me a lot of time to finally get everything looking the way I wanted. Now I upgraded to Connections 4 and all the tags in the CSS file changed. Do you have any tips on modifying my existing custom.css file that had all the color changed for Connections 3.0.1 and making it work for Connections 4 without having to start over with firebug and working from scratch?

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