H-Sphere Customization Guide

Introduction To Customization And Packaging
 

Basic interface settings can be configured through the control panel. The Look and Feel menu allows to set skins and colors, images and icons, and some interface texts.

Advanced interface customization is what goes beyond the scope of the Control Panel settings. It is performed on the H-Sphere CP server by designers and programmers with administrative rights, in order to create or modify H-Sphere interface elements.

Packaging, introduced in v.2.4, allows to create installable plugins, or packages. This is a way to share custom elements between H-Sphere installations. Third parties can use it to develop and distribute plugins that add new or extend/override standard H-Sphere functionalities. Documentation on building packages is introduced in our Developer Guide.

Customizable Elements Description Customization Packaging
Templates Design and control patterns for dynamic HTML generation. They are to be modified if you need to restructure the layout of certain pages of the Control Panel interface, or to change the look of the Control Panel header and footer.
System E-Mail Notifications A special type of templates used to generate standard email notifications sent by H-Sphere.
N/A
Context Help A special type of templates to generate context help for certain elements of the Control Panel interface.
Interface Texts Standard messages and labels that appear on the interface pages are placed in the special configuration files and may be set for different languages.
H-Sphere Languages Adding new languages to the interface and modifying language files with interface texts in different languages.
Menu Generating and modifying control panel menus and submenus and adding external links to the menu.
Skins And Icon Sets (Designs) H-Sphere interface design has a broader meaning than just configuration of certain color schemes and the corresponding icon sets, what is called the skin. It also determines the set of skins available for this design, specifies the sets of icons in the Quick Access page and enables to override the standard settings with the custom ones.
CP Crons H-Sphere utilities regularily executed on the Control Panel server.
Note: Not customizable before v.2.4.
Plan Wizards Custom plan wizards defined and configured in XML documents.
Note: Not customizable before v.2.4.
Merchant Gateways The media for making real-time payments with online credit card processing centers automatically from the CP.
Web Payment Systems The media for making payments manually from the web interface of the payment systems.
Note: Not customizable before v.2.4.
Signup Forms Generating custom signup forms to sign up users aside from the standard signup procedure provided in H-Sphere, as well as modifying the standard signup pages.

WARNING:
1. Advanced customization may produce unpredictable results after updating H-Sphere, since updates affect the template structure and the page generation.
2. Advanced customization performed by H-Sphere customers is done at their own risk and is not supported by the PSoft team.
3. You may order customization from the PSoft team. Such customization is supported hereafter. Please contact sales@psoft.net for pricing details.

 


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