Forum Discussion

Richard_Wendon's avatar
Richard_Wendon
Guide
12 years ago

Ballpark time frame for re-skinning a community, including some custom components

Hiya, 

 

I've been asked to look at reskinning an existing community. It is mostly design based changes but I can tell already that there will be some minor changes to some custom components.

 

Being honest, I have little experience with Lithium and am finding it hard to put some realistic timings on the project. 

 

What do you think is a realistic time frame. I have had a number (23 days) mentioned earlier which was for the whole UI design track.

 

But that feels excessive what are peoples thoughts and/or first hand experience of reskinning a community.

 

Many thanks in advance.

 

Richard

  • dementad's avatar
    dementad
    Genius
    12 years ago

    Richard,

     

    I am going to assume that you are the Richard Wendon at Yoyo? If so, your experience is sufficient for the task at hand :)

     

    I started down the same path in April, and I'll say that if you are only making cosmetic changes (CSS) and modifying existing custom components (Freemarker/RESTAPI), then a few days may be sufficient. In any event, you should thoroughly familiarize yourself with what you have today and how it works before changing anything. I chose to plow into it rather too optimistically, and then had to ask Lithium support to please reset my STAGE environment to match the production side :smileyembarrassed:

     

    If the custom components include Java/JQuery and you don't have that experience, you might find modifying the components requires some serious playground time.

     

    You have access in this forum to some outstanding Lithium and customer resources, and Lithium customer support is unparalled in its responsiveness. Use them both and save yourself a lot of time.

     

    Good luck to you!

     

    • Richard_Wendon's avatar
      Richard_Wendon
      Guide
      12 years ago

      That is I. Only asking because of the time sensitive nature of the project we didnt want to undertake anything that we couldnt deliver.

       

      Thanks for the quick reply and belief :)

      • cblown's avatar
        cblown
        Boss
        12 years ago

        Hi Richard

         

        We've built simple themes in a couple of weeks through to full customisations taking months. Its hard to put an exact number on it without a reasonable understanding of the layout changes and complexity of the theme.

         

        23 days isn't that bad actually if you consider UX, Visual Design and the theme implementation / customisations. (Desktop only)

         

        Pm us if you want to chat further..