Customization

All of our Web Products are fully customizable. We offer several types of customization.

You can use our Settings Feature to do basic design and UI interface configurations.
The Skins System allows you to change the design colors and backgrounds for the whole product.
If you know a little code, you can actually customize the code in our web products, and change the functionality to fit your needs.

Settings

All of our products come with a Settings Feature. This special Module allows you to do a limited set of changes to the web application's interface design. In summary, the Settings module allows you to show and hide various parts of the interface, set a "skin" or look-and-feel graphics design for your site, and customize the homepage using html and code you add yourself. Between these three features, you can redesign your website product to look and work the way you need it to. Let us look at how these are done.

Showing/Hiding the Interface Panels

Every web product from GiantIsland comes with an interface management system controlled by the Settings area. The Settings Module includes a management page that controls interface panels in the web pages, including the header, the content, and the footer areas. Every web page in your product contains these major areas, as well as some additional sub area, or "panels", hidden or collapsed inside each of these. Many of these allow you to use and navigate your product, while the rest are generally for cosmetic purposes. Your web software comes preconfigured with most panels hidden, but a few are visible and expanded, which includes the module and skin navigation panel, or dropdown menus. Others are hidden, but can be shown and added to your interface. In this way, you can add and remove pieces of the products header and footer areas as needed.

When you first visit the Settings section inside your website product, you will notice there is a listing of images shown, along with "show/hide" radio buttons. This is the management page for the overall website interface in your web product. This management in Settings allows you to set each panel to be shown or hidden in your website. In this way, you can enable or disable certain panel sections in the header and footer of your site. These generally include the following interface elements, which you can show or hide as needed:

Top Message Display - Allows you to permanently hide all message that appear when performing actions in your product.
Top Header Logo Panel - The logo panel is hidden by default, and contains the vendor's logo. You can enable then customize the code to include a logo header, if you like.
Top Header Menu - A built-in horizontal menu is hidden by default but available in your system. This needs to be customized by you in teh code, after being shown.
Top Header Module Panel - The module panel holds the two dropdowns and is on by default, allowing you to access your Modules and Skin. You may hide this panel, and include hard-coded url links to your modules instead.
Top Header Module Listing - This is the module dropdown menu, and as above, is shown, but may be hidden.
Top Header Skin Listing - This is the skin dropdown menu, and as above, is shown, but may be hidden.
Top Header Login Panel - If your website is public and doesnt need to be secured, you can hide the login panel if you like.
Bottom Footer Menu - This is hidden and another exact copy of the menu bar but in the footer.
Bottom Footer Logo Panel - Same as the logo in the header but smaller and for adding a logo in your footer.
Bottom Error Message Display - All our products run very well and rarely generate errors, but when they do, those fill up a series of hidden panels beneth every web page. You can permanently hide those here, if you need to.

By showing and hiding these panels, you can do all sorts of things to the interface. Below are some examples:

Create a Company Page - If you hide the login and module panels, then show the menu and logo panels, you can begin to create an actual website with a custom menu system and logo, much like most company or personal websites have. Keep in mind, once you hide the module panel, you cant navigate into your product. In that case, you simply need to create a link from some page to these modules. For example, to get to the Manager Module in ImageIsland, without using the dropdown menu, you would type:

http://yourdomain.com/ImageIsland/Modules/ImageManager/default.asp

Note: To change the logo and menus, you will need to know a little html and VBScript and open the ASP include pages that control these two areas inside the System folder, and add in your custom logo and change the menu as needed. But the panel system will get you started!

Set a Default Skin and then Hide the Skin Dropdown - If you set your default skin for your site, but dont want others to be able to change it, you can simply hide the Skin List Panel and in this way, set your look and feel by setting your default skin (see below) in the Settings section. You can even copy one of the sites skins, rename it, and change the artwork and colors in it using a text editor, and then add it to the system. Go once again into the Settings Module, select this new skin as your default skin, and now you have completely customized the interface to fit with a new skin your users can see, but not change.

Create a Plain White Page - By hiding all the panels, adding empty text into the homepage piece in the Settings piece, and setting your default skin to the "PlainWhite" skin, you can create a blank page for your product. It will still contain code and you can still manually link inside the product to your modules, but you basically state with a clean slate! Visually you will see a white web page with nothing in it, save what you added to the homepage. Why would you want to do this? One reason is security. You probably dont want people seeing your product much less logging in. Securing your modules will prevent that as well. But by hiding all of the interface panels in the Settings Module, you can gurantee noone can see your web application. It also allows you to change the page using the HTML Editor (see below) and so create your own custom web page, that links into the product or to one of your other pages elsewhere in your website.

These are just a few of the types of configurations you can do with Settings.

Designing A Custom Homepage

All version 2.0 of our products come with a Homepage Editor. Our editor isnt really an editor but really just a plain text field, where you can type plain text, or better, your own custom HTML and inline styles, and have them appear in the homepage of the web product. With a little HTML or CSS knowledge, you can type in your own design for your homepage, press save, and it will save your design to the homepage, replacing the current design thats there. What could be easier! Try adding some news about your site, or information about your Image Portal, or a range of content items. Using the Homepage Editor, you can fully customize the homepage anyway you like! If you want a blank page for your homepage, type in a few empty spaces, press save, and your homepage will appear clean and empty, as well. Whatever you type in the editor and save, replaces all content currently existing on the homepage. Changing the homepage design is easy with this new editor.

Skins

All of our products come with the ability to change skins using the skins listing dropdown menu at the top of the interface. But did you know you can also set a default skin in Settings? A default skin is the skin that appears when users first come to your website. By setting a default skin, you can control the look-and-feel for your web product. In addition, by hiding the Skins listing item in the Settings Module, you can prevent your users from changing the default skin (mentioned above).

Finally, did you know the Skins system is extensible and customizeable? Your system comes with system Skins. But did you know you can customize these Skins with different colors and fonts? Its easy to do. If you have a little Cascading Style Sheet knowledge, and have a text editor, like Notepad, you can change or build your own skins for your product! To do so, simple go download the "Skins" folder inside your product. Inside this folder are subfolders named for the skin code they contain. Simply go find the design that you wish to customize, open it with a text editor, like Notepad, and start changing colors and text styles as needed. Just save the CSS and post that skin folder back to your website on the server. Suddenly choosing that skin you can see changes appear in your site's graphical design.

Another way to to change the interface is to create your own skins! To do so, copy a skin folder as above. Rename it to the skin name you like (should not have spaces in the name, if possible), and then open up the CSS and start changing colors, etc. When done, save all the CSS in this folder. Be sure to change the name of your new skin folder as well in the "configuration.xml" file. Now drag the folder into the Skins folder of your live site. It will update the dropdown skins menu at the top, and you can or should see your new skin name in that list. Choose your new skin, and suddenly your web product is now using your new custom skin!

Customization

Our products are fully customizable, and are shipped with the original source code necessary to change the product as needed. Almost all changes simply require a text editor, like Notepad, to update. If you know a little CSS, HTML, ASP VBScript, or C#, you can begin to change the code in your product and make it do different things for you. Some changes that you can make include items like, adding a logo header, changing Module interface colors and layouts, and even adding functionality using our revolutionary XML Database system. By going into one of the more popular modules, you will see many ".asp" scripts you can modify. These ASP scripts can be changed using Notepad. In general, you should know a little VBScript if you want to modify the ASP code. Be careful and dont break the rules of good coding or you may reak the website. Always keep a clean backup of the product, just in case.

In addition, you will see a "SystemSettings.asp" item inside the "Systems" folder in the product. This script controls most of the overall settings for the ASP product code. Most of the values in this script have full comments explaining what each variable does. Feel free to explore this web page and change values as needed. In general, we recommend you only change variables relating to items like system email addresses, domain addresses, and folder names, if you choose to change them.

We cannot list all the effective changes you can make to your product, but will say simply that we have tried to "modularize all our code" so that changes are as intuitive and simple to make as possible. You can do things like, create new Modules, modify Modules, add new database tables to modules (using our simple text-based XML system), add skins, even rewrite the layouts so that certain areas are permanently removed or new ones added. The whole architecture, including the layout panels, are designed so you can find their "includes" and remove or delete them in pieces from the interface, if needed. If you get errors, you know you have modified something that cannot be changed, so our message and error system will help you navigate our architecure, as you make changes. In most cases, you can easily add new functionality using our centralized database class architecture and call your own data and expand your product. Again, all our code and systems are designed for you, the end-user, in order that you may get the most flexibility and customization possible with the fewest hassles from all our products.