Customizing Branding

Once you've setup your local development environment the first task you're likely to want to undertake is a customization of the look and feel of Federation Registry for your federation.

Easy customization was a core requirement of the project from the start so we've gone to great lengths to ensure that as much content as possible is able to be easily modified.

To get started take a copy of the entire branding directory. You MUST store this outside of the federationregistrymaster directory. If you've access Federation Registry using Git pull be sure to NOT commit any changes to branding in the project. You should instead setup a new git/svn repository for tracking changes to your branding effort.

Layout

The branding component somewhat resembles the default grails project structure with two key directories "grails-app" and "web-app" at the top level.

Applying minimal branding changes

To get started in your branding effort the most minimal set of changes you should make is as follows:
  1. Replace the file web-app/images/logo.jpg with your own logo file. This should be 102 × 50 pixels, 72 pixels/inch and use RGB palette. The background color should be #495764. The logo should be saved in jpg format.
  2. Edit the file grails-app/i18n/messages-deployment.properties and modify all references to AAF, Australian Access Federation, support.aaf.edu.au and AAF Support to those applicable for your federation.
  3. Edit the file grails-app/views/templates/_frtopnavigation.gsp - The last two <li> entries refer to AAF Support. Modify this to reflect your own federations support portal/pages/processes. THIS MUST BE MODIFIED BY DEPLOYING FEDERATIONS BEFORE WAR CREATION.

    A note about the AAF support links. The first is a static link to our online support pages and the second invokes some javascript to interact with our Zendesk support portal so that our users can log issues directly to AAF support within FR itself. If you're not using Zendesk remove this completely, you'll also want to remove references to Zendesk from from the footer template file.

    You can add or remove as many <li> blocks from _frtopnavigation.gsp as suitable to support the navigation options your federation requires.
Navigate to your app/federationregistry directory and execute 'grails importtheme <your branding dir path>' this will import your branding to your local development instance. 

If your development federation registry instance is not running you should start it now. On (re)loading pages on http://localhost:8080/federationregistry you'll see your changes applied. You can run 'grails importtheme <your branding dir path>' (from a seperate terminal) as many times as you like while the development instance is running to fine tune your branding effort

Applying more extensive branding changes

Once you're comfortable with Grails i18n, layouts, templates and views the structure of branding should become apparent. Feel free to make changes to the messages, layouts, templates and views as necessary. We would ask that you leave the footer attribute to the AAF intact.

Building your WAR file

Once your branding is complete and you're ready to move into production undertake the following
  1. Navigate to your federationregistrymaster/app/federationregistry directory
  2. Execute 'grails importtheme <your branding dir path>' to ensure all last minute branding changes are captured
  3. Execute 'grails war'
Once complete you'll have a war file located in in the federationregistrymaster/app/federationregistry/target directory with the name format federationregistry-X.Y.Z.war ready to be used in installation.

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