=head1 Customizing the Look of Your RT

While the default RT color scheme nicely matches the Best Practical colors,
you may want to personalize your RT instance to make it better fit with
your company colors.


=head1 Selecting a Theme

The fundamental look of RT comes from the selected theme. Different
RT versions have a default, and the RT admin can set the system-wide
theme with the C<$WebDefaultStylesheet> configuration value in the
F<RT_SiteConfig.pm> file.

RT comes with the following themes:

=over

=item rudder

The default layout for RT 4.2

=item aileron

The default layout for RT 4.0

=item web2

An approximation of the 3.8 style

=item ballard

Theme which doesn't rely on JavaScript for menuing

=back

If you have granted the ModifySelf right to users on your system,
they can pick a different theme for themselves by going to
Logged in as -> Settings -> Preferences and selecting a different theme.


=head1 RT Theme Editor

RT has some built-in controls to manage the look of the theme you select.
To use the Theme Editor, log in as a SuperUser (like root), and navigate
to Admin -> Tools -> Theme.

=for html <img alt="RT theme editor, defaults" src="../images/theme_editor_defaults.png">

=for :text [RT theme editor image at F<docs/images/theme_editor_defaults.png>]

=for :man [RT theme editor image at F<docs/images/theme_editor_defaults.png>]

=head2 Logo and Colors

From there you can upload a logo and pick colors for the various page
sections.  RT will automatically pick out the six most frequent primary
colors from your logo and offer them as options next to the color wheel.
In less than a minute, you can upload a logo and set a few colors.

Until you click "Save", color changes are temporary and are only shown
to you.  When you find the color scheme you want, click Save to make it
the new theme for the entire RT instance. If you ever want to wipe the
slate clean, you can use one or both of the "Reset to default" buttons.

=head2 Basic CSS Customization

The theme editor lets you do a bit more if you know your way around CSS
or have a web designer who does.  By writing your own styles in the
Custom CSS box, you can quickly customize the RT look and feel pretty
extensively. The primary RT elements are stubbed out for you in the
edit box.

After making CSS changes, click Try to see how they look, and click Save
when you're done.


=head1 Advanced CSS Customization

If you're more ambitious and good at CSS, you can go even further and
create your own theme. As with all modifications to RT, it's a bad idea
to just change the CSS for one of the standard RT themes in place. When
you upgrade, if you protect your modifications from being over-written,
you may miss out on updates that are required for new features. In the
worst case, an upgrade might wipe out all of your changes.

Below are a few approaches to customizing RT's CSS.

=head2 Additional files

RT allows you to conveniently include additional CSS files after the
default CSS styles, via the C<@CSSFiles> configuration option.  To add
an extra CSS file, for example F<my-site.css>, create the local overlay
directory:

    $ mkdir -p local/static/css/

And place your F<my-site.css> file in it.  Finally, adjust your
C<@CSSFiles> in your F<RT_SiteConfig.pm>:

    Set( @CSSFiles, ('my-site.css') );

CSS added this way is included across all themes.

If you are writing an extension, see L<RT/AddStyleSheets> for how to
simply and programmatically add values to C<@CSSFiles>.


=head1 Designing Your Own Theme

The above approaches work well if you need to change the look of
part of RT, but you may want to design your own RT theme
and leave the standard RT themes available to users unmodified. In
this case, you'll want to create your own CSS directory.

As shown above, the C<local> directory is the place to put
local modifications to RT. Run the following commands in your
C</opt/rt4> directory (or wherever your RT is installed) to get
started:

    $ mkdir -p local/static/css/localstyle
    $ cp -R share/static/css/rudder/* local/static/css/localstyle/

    $ mkdir -p local/html/NoAuth/css/localstyle
    $ cp -R share/html/NoAuth/css/rudder/* local/html/NoAuth/css/localstyle/

You can call your "localstyle" directory whatever you want and you don't
have to copy the rudder theme to start from, but it's a good place to
start off for RT4.

Now set C<$WebDefaultStylesheet> in RT_SiteConfig.pm to the new directory
name you selected, for example:

    Set( $WebDefaultStylesheet, 'localstyle' );

If you restart your RT it should look just the same (assuming you copied
your current default theme), but if you go to your Preferences page you'll
see that the system default theme is now your new "localtheme."

If you look at the CSS being loaded, you'll also see that the main css
file is now being loaded from your local directory. But you'll also see
that files are still being loaded from the main RT css directories as
well. Why?

The place to start understanding the loading order of RT's CSS is the
C<main.css> file. You'll see it first loads C<..base/main.css> which
are the base styles for RT along with styles for other tools RT uses
like jQuery. After loading all of the base styles, C<main.css> then
imports a theme-specific version with overrides and new style elements
for the selected theme. So as long as you follow the CSS precedence rules
and use the correct specificity, you get the last chance to modify things.

You can start modifying things by editing the CSS files in your new
localstyle directory. When you upgrade RT, you'll want to look specifically
at any changes to the style you started from to see if there are any new
styles you want to merge into your new style.