Portal Customization

[Chris Geer <ch...@cxtsoftware.com>]

We are currently building a site based on Rave and are trying to figure out
the best way to do a few things. I'm hoping I can get some advice from the
brain trust.

   1. We want to be able to change the look and feel of the site. Beyond
   just tweaking the css using the custom_css approach we would like to be
   able to overhaul the headers and footers. I was hopeful when I saw the
   header.tag file but it looks like that isn't used in the page.jsp. It looks
   like page.jsp (and the other pages) all have the headers and such defined
   instead of included. Is the eventual goal to have page.jsp include headers
   for example so they are easy to overwrite and customize? I'd like to avoid
   having to have a custom page.jsp in my project.
   2. Is there a way to dynamically load a gadget in a particular view? For
   example, if we wanted to create a menubar type gadget whose purpose was to
   launch other screens. The slickest approach would to be able to have the
   click events just dynamically load a gadget in canvas mode when a button is
   clicked. So essentially, we want to be able to pop-up gadgets in canvas
   (overlay) mode without having to display them in on the screen in home or
   collapsed mode. I was hopeful the open-views feature would allow me to do
   this but it only allows you to open views that are part of the current
   gadget which would require me to have a massive gadget definition with lots
   of views defined. So something like open-views that allows you to define
   what gadget definition to load (similar to how the original open-views spec
   was proposed [1]). Would the embedded-experience do this? Does that work in
   Rave?

Thanks,
Chris


[1] http://docs.opensocial.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4849867

RE: Portal Customization

["Carlucci, Tony" <ac...@mitre.org>]

Hi Chris, one thing I've been wanting to do is increase the amount of JSP tags we have in Rave, to start breaking up our pages into more customizable components.   So like you mentioned, one could simply overlay a particular tag for the "greeting" without having to overlay the entire page.jsp file.

I wanted to wait until most of the Bootstrap work had been finished, but if this is something you wanted to start diving into, feel free to start creating some tickets for breaking out logical pieces of the pages into tags (and of course we always like patch submissions!).

A good current example is the title.tag file - a small focused bit of JSP to render the page title, that could easily be overridden.

Thanks, Tony

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Chris Geer [mailto:chris@cxtsoftware.com]
>Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 7:03 PM
>To: users@rave.apache.org
>Subject: Re: Portal Customization
>
>Ok, I think I've partially answered my first question. There is a
>header.jsp and footer.jsp that can be overwritten rather easily, but they
>don't change anything on the default page, they add elements above/below
>the default view. I still can't figure out what header.tag does but I'm
>sure I'm just missing something.
>
>So, with that discovery, I need to reword my 1st question a little. Is
>there any plans to make the "header" that contains the "Hello
><username>..." and other links (widget store, logout) customizable without
>having to overwrite page.jsp? I'd be glad to do the work if there is no
>current plan.
>
>Thanks,
>Chris
>
>On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 6:28 PM, Chris Geer <ch...@cxtsoftware.com> wrote:
>
>> We are currently building a site based on Rave and are trying to figure
>> out the best way to do a few things. I'm hoping I can get some advice from
>> the brain trust.
>>
>>    1. We want to be able to change the look and feel of the site. Beyond
>>    just tweaking the css using the custom_css approach we would like to be
>>    able to overhaul the headers and footers. I was hopeful when I saw the
>>    header.tag file but it looks like that isn't used in the page.jsp. It looks
>>    like page.jsp (and the other pages) all have the headers and such defined
>>    instead of included. Is the eventual goal to have page.jsp include headers
>>    for example so they are easy to overwrite and customize? I'd like to avoid
>>    having to have a custom page.jsp in my project.
>>    2. Is there a way to dynamically load a gadget in a particular view?
>>    For example, if we wanted to create a menubar type gadget whose
>purpose was
>>    to launch other screens. The slickest approach would to be able to have
>the
>>    click events just dynamically load a gadget in canvas mode when a button is
>>    clicked. So essentially, we want to be able to pop-up gadgets in canvas
>>    (overlay) mode without having to display them in on the screen in home or
>>    collapsed mode. I was hopeful the open-views feature would allow me to
>do
>>    this but it only allows you to open views that are part of the current
>>    gadget which would require me to have a massive gadget definition with
>lots
>>    of views defined. So something like open-views that allows you to define
>>    what gadget definition to load (similar to how the original open-views spec
>>    was proposed [1]). Would the embedded-experience do this? Does that
>work in
>>    Rave?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Chris
>>
>>
>> [1] http://docs.opensocial.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4849867
>>

Re: Portal Customization

[Chris Geer <ch...@cxtsoftware.com>]

Ok, I think I've partially answered my first question. There is a
header.jsp and footer.jsp that can be overwritten rather easily, but they
don't change anything on the default page, they add elements above/below
the default view. I still can't figure out what header.tag does but I'm
sure I'm just missing something.

So, with that discovery, I need to reword my 1st question a little. Is
there any plans to make the "header" that contains the "Hello
<username>..." and other links (widget store, logout) customizable without
having to overwrite page.jsp? I'd be glad to do the work if there is no
current plan.

Thanks,
Chris

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 6:28 PM, Chris Geer <ch...@cxtsoftware.com> wrote:

> We are currently building a site based on Rave and are trying to figure
> out the best way to do a few things. I'm hoping I can get some advice from
> the brain trust.
>
>    1. We want to be able to change the look and feel of the site. Beyond
>    just tweaking the css using the custom_css approach we would like to be
>    able to overhaul the headers and footers. I was hopeful when I saw the
>    header.tag file but it looks like that isn't used in the page.jsp. It looks
>    like page.jsp (and the other pages) all have the headers and such defined
>    instead of included. Is the eventual goal to have page.jsp include headers
>    for example so they are easy to overwrite and customize? I'd like to avoid
>    having to have a custom page.jsp in my project.
>    2. Is there a way to dynamically load a gadget in a particular view?
>    For example, if we wanted to create a menubar type gadget whose purpose was
>    to launch other screens. The slickest approach would to be able to have the
>    click events just dynamically load a gadget in canvas mode when a button is
>    clicked. So essentially, we want to be able to pop-up gadgets in canvas
>    (overlay) mode without having to display them in on the screen in home or
>    collapsed mode. I was hopeful the open-views feature would allow me to do
>    this but it only allows you to open views that are part of the current
>    gadget which would require me to have a massive gadget definition with lots
>    of views defined. So something like open-views that allows you to define
>    what gadget definition to load (similar to how the original open-views spec
>    was proposed [1]). Would the embedded-experience do this? Does that work in
>    Rave?
>
> Thanks,
> Chris
>
>
> [1] http://docs.opensocial.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4849867
>