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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 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.
Extending a theme
You can extend an existing theme to use a different color scheme or to display different content.

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.
  - 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 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™.

Extending a theme

You can extend an existing theme to use a different color scheme or to display different content.

Templates can be reused in multiple themes and still maintain a different color scheme or content by using the _options.vm file. The _options.vm file stores variables that can be used in the other templates in order to include or ignore content or file imports. Include the _options.vm file in the weblog.vm template in order to set values in the _header.vm template.

Example

The Khaki_Standard theme reuses the blog theme templates, but contains an _options.vm file with one line: #set ($lookAndFeel = "khaki")

The _header.vm checks for the $lookAndFeel variable, and includes the appropriate .css file:

#if ($lookAndFeel)
	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="$url.site/roller-ui/styles/${lookAndFeel}.css" />
#end

The result is two themes, with two different color schemes, based on the same set of templates.