Before you start with the customization of your In-Portal-based website, you will need two software tools - an FTP client and a text editor. If you do not have these, we recommend using AbsoluteFTP (http://www.vandyke.com/download/absoluteftp/index.html) and EditPlus (http://www.editplus.com/download.html).

The In-Portal Platform has been created with user customization in mind, so customization can be easy enough provided you get yourself familiar with a few basic principles.

The Front-End (the part of a website that regular users see and interact with in their browsers) of In-Portal website is controlled entirely by the use of templates. Templates are simple HTML files with special In-Portal tags thrown in. All template files are located in the 'themes/' folder of your In-Portal installation. After doing a fresh In-Portal install you will always have a 'themes/default' folder that contains the template files for the In-Link, In-News and In-Bulletin modules in their respective subfolders - 'inlink/', 'innews/' and 'inbulletin/'. If you purchased In-Commerce you will also find a 'themes/onlinestore' theme folder in addition to the 'themes/default'. If you are an In-Link2 customers you can also use the In-Link2 theme for In-Portal with In-link3, by going to http://www.in-portal.net/downloads/themes.html, downloading either in-link2_theme.zip or link2_theme.tar.gz, and then uncompressing the file in the 'themes/' folder of your In-Portal installation. Please refer to a README file for instrutions on In-link2 theme installation.

To start customizing your existing themes, it is a good idea to make a backup first. To do this, start up your FTP client and open a connection to your server. Go into In-Portal's 'themes/' folder and make a copy of the folder that contains the theme you want to customize ('default/' for the default theme, 'onlinestore/' for the In-Commerce theme, and 'inlink2/' for the In-Link2 theme). You will be using the copy you just made for your new theme, so you may want to give it a meaningful name. Now login to your admin console, go to Configuration->Themes, select your new theme and click the 'Edit' button. On the window that follows, check the boxes next to 'Enabled' and 'Primary'. Now that your new theme is set as primary, you can make changes to it and see the results on your site's Front-End.

Generally, the customization process goes as follows:
1. You FTP to your server, go to the 'themes/' folder of In-Portal and download any template files you wish to change to your local machine.
2. Using your text editor, you make changes to the files you downloaded.
3. After you are done modifying the files, you use your FTP client to upload the files back to the same place on the server that you got them from. At Intechnic, we recommend working on only one file at a time, uploading it back to the server, and then working on the next file.

Alternatively, you can login to your In-Portal Admin Console, go to Configuration->Themes and select the 'Templates' tab to get a list of all templates that are part of the selected theme. From there, you can select individual template files, and edit them by clicking on the 'Edit' button. You need to have 'write' (777) permissions on your 'themes' folder and template files you are going to modify in order for this to work.

How do you know which one of the many template files to change? For this, you may have to do a little bit of tracing around. Depending on the module you are trying to customize, it is a good idea to start from 'themes/YOUR_THEME_NAME/index.tpl', 'themes/YOUR_THEME_NAME/inlink/index.tpl', 'themes/YOUR_THEME_NAME/inbulletin/index.tpl' or 'themes/YOUR_THEME_NAME/innews/index.tpl'. These are the template files that handle In-Portal's, In-Link's, In-Bulletin's and In-News' main page layout and functionality, respectively. Examine the code in these templates to change the website's layout, or to get clues as to what other template files you need to change. To customize In-Commerce's templates, you should start from 'themes/onlinestore/index.tpl' (of course, if you specified a name for your theme other than 'onlinestore', use that name instead).