Alfresco Share Customisation – The Ixxus Application

One requirement often asked in relation to Alfresco Share is “can we make it look a bit more like this….”

where 'this' often refers to:

- Using corporate colours and logos; or

- Other in house applications; or

- Existing intranet / extranet sites; or

- Our public facing website

The answer is of course yes! BUT (of course there is a but) this is a very tedious and time consuming task as I learnt the hard way.

Seeing the need for a re-useable solution on my last Alfresco Share project, I took some time out to develop a Share Customisation Application that allows us to re-skin an Alfresco Share implementation with minimal effort. The hard part now lies with determining what you’d like the Share implementation to look like rather than how to make it happen but once the design has been agreed we can now get your implementation customised quickly.

So how does it work? Without giving too much away, we have set up a customisable ‘theme’. This theme has the ability to override the default look and feel of Share components from the main dashboard area and dashlets as well as components such as blog pages, discussions and search. Here are some examples:

The default Share Login and Dashboard

vs a customised Share Login Dashboard (excuse my poor design skills I literally did this in less than 10 minutes)

Or how about the standard Share Document Library

vs this vibrant blue theme

I bet you’re thinking ‘that’s easy, why do we need this application? That is what I initially thought too until I tried to make it happen. On closer inspection I found that Share includes over 80 CSS files - to modify each of these is just not viable. Which is why we decided to find a way to be able to customise the look and feel of Share without having to change a whole lot of CSS files.

All that we need to get your Share implementation customised are a few images (e.g corporate logos etc) and decisions on colour schemes and fonts and the like then our Application can do the rest. To find out more contact us on +44(0) 207033 2333.

Just a small note that I am not a graphics designer and these examples were mocked up quickly. They are not endorsed by our in house design team of UI experts.