Migrating themes

When migrating themes that were developed in an earlier version, you need to be aware of general guidelines, differences, and known issues.

Migrated themes should be applied to the same pages that they were designed for in the earlier version.
Migrated themes should be used with the same skins as in the earlier version. Some skins in the current version take advantage of functions that were not available in the earlier version.
In V5.x, themes were identified as either "administration" or "non-administration" themes. Using the Page Properties portlet, you could assign administration themes only to administration pages, and non-administration themes to non-administration pages. This restriction has been removed in the current version – themes are designed to work on all pages. As a result, you need to either manually assign migrated themes to the appropriate pages or update the migrated themes to support navigation across all pages.

Adding support for top-level navigation
In V5.x, themes typically began rendering navigation at level 2 of the navigation model tree. Level one nodes (Home and Administration) were accessed by a Web address in the themes banner that explicitly identified that page. With migrated themes, this method creates problems if in V6.1 you assign the V5.x theme to a page that it was not assigned to in Version 5.x portal environment. For example, if you assigned the Version 5.x Administration theme to the Home page in V6.1, the theme would not provide any way to navigate to Administration because the V5.x Administration theme contained only a link to the Home page in the toolbar.
Enabling the Organize Favorites portlet in themes
The My Favorites feature lets you bookmark a page in the portal so that you can return to it at a later time. The page is then added to your My Favorites list, which is maintained by the Organize Favorites page, which lets you create, edit, activate, order, and delete labels and Web addresses in the My Favorites list. Because the Organize Favorites label is lost when you migrate themes earlier than V6.0, you can no longer access Organize Favorites in the current version.
Enabling drag-and-drop in migrated skins
Drag-and-drop support was not available before V6.0, so you cannot access this functionality in migrated skins from V5.0.2.2 or V5.0.2.3 unless you explicitly enable it.
Making search options easier to read
In current version themes, an icon to the left of the Search box lets you access additional options including different search scopes, preferences, and help. If you migrated V5.0.2.2 or V5.0.2.3 themes for use in the current version, the additional options can be difficult to read.
Making inadvertent changes to the default theme
Pages that ship with the current version use a default theme. The default theme makes it easy to rebrand the portal by assigning a new theme as the default. Administration pages are exceptions and are explicitly assigned the default Portal theme. Doing so ensures that the Administration pages will continue to work correctly if a non-functional theme is inadvertently applied as the default theme.

Parent topic: Migrating WebSphere Portal

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