Skins

A skin is a resource that defines colors, fonts, and other aspects of various components used on the pages of a portal. A skin changes the way the user interface appears, and not how the application functions. You can use skins to give individual portals a distinct personality or to apply specific branding, achieving the appearance that suits your organization.

On the Assets and Shared Assets pages, WebCenter Portal provides several built-in skins, and you can create new custom skins. Alternatively, portal designers can develop custom skins to reflect a personality, or to incorporate specific branding. If a skin is a shared asset (available to all portals), it is shown on the Assets page of all portals along with portal-specific skins. Within a portal, you can copy an existing skin.

Note:

Creating and editing a skin is a complex task, requiring knowledge of CSS and how the skin is used in page templates. Therefore, skins should be developed by an experienced Web Developer. Oracle recommends that developers use JDeveloper to develop skins for portals. When fully developed, the developer can publish skins directly to WebCenter Portal (the portal server) or to a specific portal for immediate use or for testing. Alternatively, the developer can export the skin to a file and upload the skin to WebCenter Portal later.

Skins are based on the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) specification. A skin is made up of various selectors that define the CSS styles or properties of different parts of a component. You can adjust the look and feel of any component by changing its style-related properties. Some selectors, like a background or foreground color or a font style, may be global and affect all components.

Each skin works together with a page template to determine the overall look and feel of the pages in your portal. While the page template controls the location and behavior of components on the page, the skin controls the visual appearance of those components. The skin selectors in the skin correspond to the style classes in the page template, so when designing a skin, you must ensure that it is usable with the intended page template.

By default, a portal inherits its skin from the default specified for all portals by the system administrator.

Each page template can define a preferred skin to identify the skin that works best with that page template. When a page template is selected as the new default page template for a portal or as the system default, the default skin automatically updates to the page template's preferred skin.

You can optionally select a different skin for an individual portal, overriding the default skin setting. When you change the skin for a portal, the skin is applied to all the pages of the portal. However, the portal administration pages are not affected. They always appear with the default skin, Alta.

WARNING:

Changing the default skin to something other than the preferred skin for the selected default page template may produce unexpected results.

Select icons and actions in the toolbar to work with skins. Refer to the online help in the resulting dialogs for information and assistance.