Chapter 5. Designing your site with themes and layout templates
This chapter covers
- Creating theme and layout template projects
- The structure of Liferay’s styles and layouts
- Alloy UI and JavaScript in themes
- Theme features, such as color schemes, conditional settings, and more
At one time, I was put in charge of the development standards for a particular web development platform at a Fortune 500 company. I’d just joined the company. A lot of applications on the company’s intranet were written on this platform, and pretty much every one of them looked different. Management had a goal to try to unify the user interfaces of all of these applications so end users would approach something familiar whenever they had to use one of these applications.
I got to work. This was one of the first tasks I was assigned at my new position, and I wanted to do a good job and make a good impression. I began by looking at what all these applications needed to have in common: a way to link back to the intranet’s home page, a consistent way to access their functions, and so on. I came up with a 100-pixel space at the top of every page that was the common “header” for all applications. The logo for the app went on the left; the logo for the intranet was on the right, and a drop-down menu system implemented in JavaScript went underneath.