Customizing PAC Themes

Using page themes (skins), you can change the overall appearance of Polaris PowerPAC and Polaris PowerPAC Children’s Edition quickly and easily, without extensive code editing. In Polaris Administration, you can assign themes at the system, library, or branch level. For more information about standard Polaris PowerPAC themes, see For more information about defining and assigning children’s themes,

With knowledge of HTML, you can create a custom theme, then make your custom theme available for assignment in Polaris Administration. You must place your custom themes in a special custom folder to protect them from being overwritten during a Polaris reinstallation or upgrade.

Note:
If you copy a theme, you must use a Polaris template for the new files to be defined properly.

See also:

Theme Structure

In general, a theme consists of a style sheet (.css) file and a collection of images. The style sheet controls aspects of general page appearance—such as fonts, links, and colors—and defines classes. The Themes\Shared folder contains the default images for all themes. Each individual theme has a single site.css file that is generated from SCSS files contained in the Themes\Shared\SCSS\ folder. When creating a custom theme, you will need to generate a site.css for your theme using the shared SCSS files (instructions below). See Creating a Custom Theme for Polaris PowerPAC.

Important:
If your library uses Polaris Social (licensed integrated ChiliFresh Connections features): In the Polaris themes\shared folder, ChiliFresh Connections has its own style sheet (chilifresh.css). If your PowerPAC has a custom theme and you wish to override some of the default chilifresh.css file, copy the chilifresh.css file from the themes\shared folder to the custom theme folder and edit the custom version accordingly. The custom chilifresh.css page must contain all the CSS classes from the default version.

For Polaris PowerPAC Children’s Edition, the style sheet is located in each language-specific theme folder: Polaris/PowerPAC/Children/themes/language code/<theme name>.

Header Logo

For your header logo, you can use a .jpg file or a .gif file. The default header logo image is .gif file (header_logo.gif.) However, custom themes can use either header_logo.jpg or header_logo.gif. Note that header_logo.gif supports header logo images that have a transparent background.