If you would like to create a custom theme fpr IBM COnnections 5.5 Communities according to the description in the Wiki, you need to keep the following in mind:
- The reference to the default theme files in the documentation is wrong. The correct jar file to use is “com.ibm.social.hikari.theme_*.jar” instead of “com.ibm.oneui3.styles_*.jar” otherwise you will not get the correct files for the Hikari theme but the old Gen4 theme files (IBM will correct the documentation here)
- You also need to make sure that you delete the TEMP and WSTEMP folders of ALL Connections application servers (path e.g. “/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/AppSrv01/(ws)temp/”) and restart also ALL your application servers. It is not sufficient to just delete the temp files of the InfraStructure cluster and restart that one (although both Common.ear and Communitie.ear resides on that cluster).
- Double check that you have no typo in the path name of the CSS files in your communities-config.xml. They must match exactly the names you use in the themes folder.
- You can use a “custom.css” file within your custom theme folder to specifiy your theme changes so that you do not need to modify the default theme css files.
If you miss one of these steps you might end up with a community theme which looks like the old Gen4 theme from IBM Connections 5.0
Be also aware that, if you have customized the Connections theme itself, you need to make these changes also for every custom Community theme.
IBM Connections 5.5: Custom Community Themes based on the new Connections 5.5 (Hikary ) design