PAC Customization

You can customize Polaris PowerPAC, Polaris PowerPAC Children’s Edition, and Mobile PAC at the program level, beyond the features offered through Polaris Administration; for example, by creating custom themes, layouts or entire pages. You need some knowledge of HTML for some techniques; others require more advanced programming skills.

Before you begin, keep in mind that you can customize many aspects of Polaris PowerPAC, Polaris PowerPAC Children’s Edition, and Mobile PAC without any programming knowledge. Polaris Administration settings control many aspects of PAC function and appearance, and because these settings are stored in the database, they are retained at upgrade.

Also, you can edit most page text and messages using Polaris Language Editor (Web Admin Tool). See the Web Admin Tool online Help for more information.

Finally, Innovative Interfaces offers several service-level options for libraries that want to customize Polaris PowerPAC beyond Polaris Administration or Polaris Language Editor settings, but do not have the staff resources to do so. Contact a Customer Account Manager for more information.

Important:

To see the effects of any changes, you may need to update page caches. Restart the Internet Information Server (IIS) to clear the cache and load any pages that have been changed, or use the Reload feature in the Polaris Language Editor (Web Admin Tool). This reloads Polaris PowerPAC Children’s Edition at the same time. Polaris Hosted customers should contact Polaris Customer Support to perform an IIS reset. You may also need to close and re-open browsers.

The following table shows features available for customization, the skills necessary to perform customization, and whether your changes persist through upgrade.

Feature	Skills/ Knowledge Required	5.2	5.5 & Later	Persists Through Upgrade	Notes
Innovative-designed standard themes (5)	Polaris System Administration	X	X	Yes
Dashboard left or right	Polaris System Administration	X	X	Yes
Custom header logo	Polaris System Administration	X	X	Yes
Branch name display and alignment	Polaris System Administration	X	X	Yes
Custom return link for header logo	Polaris System Administration	X	X	Yes
Header background and text color	Polaris System Administration	X	X	Yes
Overall color theme, font family and sizes, spacing, etc.	SCSS, CSS	X	X	See note.	See Customizing Layouts. Typically changes and overrides to the SCSS files can be set once, but it is advisable to review those changes when upgrading.
Custom image files for format icons, etc.	PowerPAC file structure	X	X	Some	Back up custom images before upgrade to be sure.
Custom pages from a provided custom page template	HTML	X	X	Yes	Polaris 5.5: Custom pages from the provided template must use the Polaris 5.5 template moving forward.
Custom menu categories and options	XML	X	X	Yes	Format of HeaderData.xml for Polaris 5.5 has not changed.
URL deep links into the catalog for searches and titles	N/A	X	X	Yes	URL format and structures for PowerPAC 5.5 have not changed.
Custom display strings defined in WebAdmin	Polaris WebAdmin (Language Editor)	X	X	Yes
XSLT template files for headers and footers	XML, XSLT, HTML	X		See note.	Not used in 5.5. See Customizing Layouts.
Master Site Page (site.master) modifications of headers, dashboards, and footers	HTML, C#, .NET		X	See note.	See Customizing Layouts. Edits to PowerPAC's site.master page in general can be used with minor edits in future versions, but Innovative reserves the right to modify the default site.master page.
Edit ASPX and ASCX files	HTML, C#, .NET	X	X	See note.	See Customizing Pages. Innovative reserves the right to change the content area of each PowerPAC page between versions.