Chapter 1
Customizing the IBM Lotus Learning Management System User interface
There are several ways you can tailor the IBM® Lotus® Learning Management System (LMS) interface to control the product's look and feel and the user's access to its features. Depending on the nature of the changes you want to make, customization can involve one or more of the following:
•Changing default settings that affect what the user can see and do. You can do this either through the Administrator interface or by editing XML files.
•Editing properties, template, graphics, and style sheet files.
•Editing the HTML files that constitute the Help system.
•Editing the application’s JavaServer Pages™ (JSPs)changing the HTML content, adding or removing custom tags or overriding the default settings of their attributes, adding or changing functionality by including Java™ code or JavaScript™, adding or removing include statements, inserting or changing forward statementsor writing your own.
•Copying and renaming portions of the directory tree on the Learning Management Module server (LMMS) and Delivery server (DS) and editing the copied files to create a new interface. (The aggregation of such copied and edited files, together with the information necessary to locate the files and identify the set of users to whom they apply, is known as a customization set.)
•Creating custom reports. (This process is described in the Administrator’s Guide.)
•Writing directly to the LMS database.
This document describes the aspects of the Student interface that you can customize without having to write directly to the LMS database or program in Java. The LMS database schema is described in the Administrator's Guide.
Note: If you are upgrading to the LMS from a version of LearningSpace® that you have customized, changes that you made to the LearningSpace interface will be lost because the implementations of the two applications are radically different. Changes that you make in the LMS interface may be lost when you upgrade to subsequent versions of the product or reinstall the current version. It is therefore advisable to save backup copies of all files that you customize.
The user interface consists of a number of JSPs whose visual attributes you can modify. These visual attributes include the following:
•static text
•colors and fonts
•graphical images
•background colors
•frame dimensions
