When developing on top of a portal platform to support an intranet or extranet, a portion of the development time is spent adjusting the out-of-box user templates to adjust the look and feel of the platform for your organization. Generally your deployment will not need to look like anything like the sites posted on http://cssremix.com/ or http://www.webcreme.com/, but will meet business needs by adjusting basic elements like navigation, color palate and logo placement.

After spending some time doing custom UI development with WebCenter Spaces 11G I have gathered a few tips that I hope can help to speed anyone's efforts to quickly "skin" a WebCenter Spaces deployment. A detailed white paper was released that outlines a technique to quickly update the UI during runtime - http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/webcenter/pdf/owcs_r11120_cust_skins_runtime_wp.pdf. Customizing at "runtime" means using CSS and images to adjust the page layout and feel, which when creatively done can change the pages drastically.

WebCenter also allows for detailed templates to manage the placement of major page elements like menus, sidebar, etc, but by adjusting only images and CSS we can end up with something like the custom solution shown below.

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Let's dive right in and take a look at some tools to make our efforts more efficient.