As Lithium community managers know, one of the many advantages of our platform is the extent to which you can customize the appearance of a community to comply with corporate or other branding guidelines. Our goal is to offer community members a seamless transition between corporate and community sites.
Some companies choose to make minimal changes—switching a few colors and adding the company logo—while others completely rebrand their Lithium communities with new images, colors, fonts, and other elements that are part of their corporate identity.
Right now, we (Lithium) do almost all of the customization for you, but plans (and development) are underway to return control of a community's appearance to community managers. In the mean time, the attached doc will give you some insight into our approach to customization.
Here's a small excerpt:
The pages that you see in a community that runs on the Lithium platform are customized using a hierarchy of settings that control the layout of the page, the location of each block of content, and the appearance of each element on the page.
- The foundation layer is a grid of twenty-four columns into which all pages fit.
- The next layer is a page layout (it’s actually defined as series of rows on the page) that determines the sizes and positions of blocks of content. Lithium defines more than a dozen standard layouts for various types of pages.
- Next, come the components that determine which content appears in each block.
Together, these three layers control the structure and content of the page.
In addition to a more detailed description (and copious illustrations) of layouts, components, and skins, the Customization Guide also contains a full list of the Lithium Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) extensions.
For the moment, this is background information, but it will come in handy later this year.
![[ATTACHMENT]](http://lithosphere.i.lithium.com/skins/images/621051670E0B76E86E6386E2BF622886/base/images/message_has_attachment.png "Contains an attachment")
