by Dan Iverson

#335 – io_homes DPK Module

This week on the podcast, Kyle and Dan talk about the changes to the 8.60 database upgrade and the new PPTLS860 project. Dan also shares some updates to the IO_STYLE_859 project and discusses his new io_homes DPK module.

The PeopleSoft Administrator Podcast hosted by Dan Iverson and Kyle Benson.

Show Notes

by Dan Iverson

#325 – psadmin.io Themes

The PeopleSoft Administrator Podcast hosted by Dan Iverson and Kyle Benson

This week on the podcast, Kyle and Dan talk about the new psadmin.io Themes for PeopleTools 8.59 (and 8.58), using the OCI Auto Scale project to save money on OCI, and the benefits of blogging.

Show Notes

by Dan Iverson

psadmin.io Themes for PeopleTools 8.59

We are releasing our newest version of our Themes for PeopleSoft 8.59 (and 8.58). We use these stylesheets on our non-production environments so that users can easily recognize which environment they are in, and most important, know they aren’t in production.

The Themes are released as an Application Data Set that you can easiliy import into your applications. The ADS project includes stylesheets and Branding Themes.

Importing Themes

Download the new themes from the Github respository. Under the Releases, you can download the lastest IO_STYLE_859.zip release. Unpack the zip file to your Data Migration File Location.

You use the Data Migration Workbench’s “Load Project From File” feature to import the themes and stylesheets.

Assigning Themes

To set the main theme for your system,

  1. Navigate to PeopleTools > Portal > Branding > Branding System Options
  2. Select the IO_ theme of your choice.
  3. You will also need to add a stylesheet for Classic Plus. Add the cooresponding IO_<color>_859_PTCP_SS as an additional stylesheet.

  1. If you have set Theme Assignments, you can update those as well under PeopleTools > Portal > Branding > Assign Branding Themes

SQL for Refreshes

Typically, the IO_STYLE_859 is load into production but not used. During your refresh, you can use the following SQL to configure your new environment to use a theme.

UPDATE sysadm.psoptions
SET
    ptbrandtheme = 'IO_GREEN_859_THEME',
    themestyletype = 'PTCP';

TRUNCATE TABLE sysadm.psoptionsaddl;

INSERT INTO sysadm.psoptionsaddl 
VALUES (
    'C',
    'CSS',
    'IO_GREEN_859_PTCP_SS',
    0
);

Colors

If you are just starting these stylesheets for your non-production environments, here is a suggestion for how to color code environments. This is how I use the colors:

Environment Color
Development 1 Green
Development 2 Teal
Development 3 Blue
Test Red
UAT/QA Grey
Sandbox Brown
Project 1 Purple
Project 2 Pink
Project 3 Yellow

I used https://colordesigner.io/ to help build the color schemes.

Orange

Primary Dark Light Accent
#FF8100 #FF5100 #FFAA00 #004757

Red

Primary Dark Light Accent
#94090D #5C0002 #D40D12 #1dfff9

Green

Primary Dark Light Accent
#097609 #075807 #70AF1A #591aaf

Purple

Primary Dark Light Accent
#553285 #36175E #9768D1 #a2d168

Blue

Primary Dark Light Accent
#0074D9 #00448D #7ABAF2 #f2b27a

Teal

Primary Dark Light Accent
#009798 #227273 #9DF3F4 #f49e9d

Yellow

Primary Dark Light Accent
#CCCC04 #8d8d03 #FFFF52 #5252ff

Brown

Primary Dark Light Accent
#A36F44 #6B4732 #F7DEB2 #b2cbf7

Pink

Primary Dark Light Accent
#AA3366 #552233 #CC5599 #55cc88

Grey

Primary Dark Light Accent
#707070 #3B3B3B #BABABA #FD7400

by Dan Iverson

#89 – Gotchas

This week Kyle and Dan discuss UI improvements from Sasank and Dan’s new Fluid Stylesheets, using Git and GitLab to manage DPK files, managing Favorites with Unified Navigation and some “Gotchas” Kyle found during his 8.55 upgrade project.

Show Notes

by Dan Iverson

psadmin.io Stylesheets for Fluid

Last year we released a set of stylesheets to brand your non-production environments. Those stylesheets were built for the Classic UI and not for Fluid. Today we are releasing Fluid versions of the stylesheets.

The main colors are the same, but since Fluid uses a darker color for UI the themes are darker than the Classic versions. Here screenshots of the Fluid Homepage with each theme:

Blue

Green

Grey

Orange

Purple

Red

Yellow

Improvements

One change the stylesheets make beyond the color is adding a button style around the Homepage Tab selection. This should improve the usability of the homepage (thanks to Kyle for idea and CSS).

Environments

Use the colors however you want, but the list below is how I’m using the colors:

  • DEV1 – Green
  • DEV2 – Light Blue
  • DEV3 – Purple
  • TST – Red
  • QA/UAT – Grey
  • SBX (Sandbox and Nightly Refresh) – Yellow

Installation

Installing these scripts is simple. All of the changes are included in a single Data Migration project, so you can import all the styles with the Data Migration Workbench.

  1. Download the latest IO_STYLES_FLUID.zip
  2. Unzip the IO_STYLES_FLUID.zip to your Data Migration file location.
  3. Navigate to PeopleTools > Lifecycle Management > Migrate Data > Data Migration Workbench
  4. Select “Load Project From File”
  5. Select the file location and the IO_STYLES_FUILD project.
  6. Select “Submit Project for Copy”

After the Migration Project is loaded, change the theme for your application.

  1. Navigate to PeopleTools > Portal > Branding > Branding System Options
  2. Select the IO_THEME_xxx you want.
  3. Click OK.
  4. Log out and log back in to see the changes.

Change the Logo

To change the logo, you can upload a new image file to use. You have two options:

  1. Replace the IO_WHITE_32 logo with your own image
  2. Upload a new image and change the Theme Macro Set value for PT_LOGO_IMAGE_NAME and PT_LOGO_IMAGE_NAME_SMALL

Community Thanks

A huge “Thank You” to Sasank Vemana for his excellent blog posts on Branding Fluid and Kyle for his feedback and sharing some of his CSS with the project.

by Dan Iverson

#44 – Changing Operating Systems

This week on The PeopleSoft Administrator Podcast, Dan and Kyle talk about the psadmin.io Stylesheets, Enterprise Manager 13c, and new portal behavior in recent PeopleTools patches. Then, Kyle shares his thoughts about possibly changing Operating Systems.

We want to make this podcast part of the community discussion on PeopleSoft administration. If you have comments, feedback, or topics you’d like us to talk about, we want to hear from you! You can email us at podcast@psadmin.io, tweet us at @psa_io, or use the Twitter hashtag #psadminpodcast.

You can listen to the podcast here on psadmin.io or subscribe with your favorite podcast player using the URL below, or subscribe in iTunes.

Podcast RSS Feed

Show Notes

by Dan Iverson

psadmin.io Stylesheets for 8.54 and 8.55

I’m happy to release a set of stylesheets for PeopleTools 8.55 for everyone to use. The stylesheets are based on the TANGERINE theme (8.53 look and feel), so they won’t work with Fluid pages. For people who are using the Classic look, these stylesheets are a great way to ensure your users know which environment they are using.

I’ve used stylesheets for pre-8.50 environments from Duncan Davies in the past and built custom stylesheets for 8.53. But with the Branding Framework in 8.54 and 8.55, using custom styles are even easier. Thanks to Sasank Vemana for his great posts on using the Branding Framework as well. I used his posts to build these stylesheets.

Colors

There are six styles in the project. The colors (except the purple theme) are based on the Bootstrap default theme.

Green

Green Header

Light Blue

Light Blue Header

Purple

Purple Header

Red

Red Header

Grey

Grey Stylesheet

Yellow

Yellow Header

Environments

Use the colors however you want, but the list below is how I’m using the colors:

  • DEV1 – Green
  • DEV2 – Light Blue
  • DEV3 – Purple
  • TST – Red
  • QA/UAT – Grey
  • SBX (Sandbox and Nightly Refresh) – Yellow

Load Stylesheets and Branding Data

You can apply the stylesheets three ways: manually load the project with App Designer and Data Mover, apply a change package with Change Assistant, or follow Sasank’s post and use the stylesheets from the GitHub repository.

App Designer

Download the change package, updIO_STYLES_855.zip, from the GitHub repository. Extract the updIO_STYLES_855.zip file to get the project and scripts. In App Designer, copy the project IO_STYLES_855 from the change package folder into the target database.

CopyProject

Import the ptbr_io_theme.dat file using Data Mover and the script ptbr_theme_io_imp.dms (under updIO_STYLES_855\updIO_STYLES_855_batch\filereferences\scripts).

DataMoverCopy

Run the updateSystemBranding.sql script to update the Branding System Options and insert the IO_LOGO and IO_HDR_BLUE stylesheets.

UpdateSystemBranding

Change Package

Download the change package, updIO_STYLES_855.zip, from the GitHub repository. Apply the change package against any environment where you want to use the stylesheets. (You’ll need to use the “Apply Updates” mode in newer Change Assistant versions). The change package will import the IO_STYLES_855 project, import the Branding Framework theme data, and update System Branding Options.

Refreshes

If you want to use the styles in your non-production environments, you can import the project and Branding Framework setup and theme data into your production database. Skip the SQL script to update the System Branding Options. Add the SQL commands from the Change Package script updateSystemBranding.sql into your refresh scripts.

8.55 Homepage

After you load the project and run the scripts, Classic pages will show up with the new stylesheest. If you are on 8.55 and want to use the Classic homepage, you’ll need to run the SQL below:

update psuseroptndefn set user_option_value = 'C' where optn_category_lvl = 'PPTL' and useroptn in ('HPPC', 'HPTABLET');

Header Color

To change the header colors, change the Additional Stylesheet on the “PeopleTools > Portal > Branding > Branding System Options” page.

Change Header Color

Logo

There are two ways you can replace the logo with your own:

  1. Replace the IO_LOGO file under “PeopleTools > Portal > Branding > Branding Objects > Images”
  2. Upload your logo as a new image and replace the IO_LOGO reference in the IO_LOGO css file.

Contribute

I have created a GitHub project with the styleets used in the project. If you want to add any changes or suggest improvments, please send them in or contribute to the GitHub repository.