Customizing the Discovery Application

The software to be deployed for the Discovery sites will be configured for each partner site. To maintain a single code base, the customization has been moved to a few select files.

The master templates and other files must not be touched for customizing partners sites'''

Template customizations (Home Page)

Templates that will need real customizations (currently this is the homepage) will provide a "customization template" in app/views/custom. These templates can set up variables for the main templates, and may also set up #content_for() blocks that will be inserted in predefined positions of the main page. We may also provide pre-made customization files for the partners.

CSS customization

It's possible to provide a custom style sheet for each edition and each edition type. These styles reside in public/stylesheets/editions/. The edition style sheet must be named after the edition's siglum (e.g. "def.css"), while the type stylesheet will be named after the type (e.g. "facsimile.css"). This will allow a different layout/schema for each edition.

To customize the home page, it's necessary to edit home.css directly. This should only be necessary to customize "edition list" entries - each list item will receive an id that is <edition_name>_li.

Start page image/banner customization

To customize the banner on the home page, it's necessary to replace the header images in public/images/start_page. There are subfolders for each customized header - just drag the files to the main directory.