Has anyone tried customizing each category with different headers and footers, I have seven catagori

Hi rizalvi,

Creating and applying different skins per node is possible in Studio.  It is also possible to create different page layouts across nodes (Categories) to address your components question.  Key point is that a skin is not a page layout and vice versa.

Creating the skin is done in Studio.  It requires creating the new Skin and, just like the current skin, setting the Properties (user friendly CSS), Images (assets related to the skin), CSS, and the Wrapper (houses the header and footer amongst other things).  Instruction on skin creation is referenced in the Lithosphere via Studio tutorials.

Once the skin is created, it is then available to be applied to the node where it should appear.  Refer to this article on applying the skin you created via the Admin.  Note that there are global pages in the application (search, profile) that will take the skin of the Community by default.

Creating different page layouts (meaning the non skin elements listed above, but the Community components that make up what appears on each page) can also be created.  Refer to this article that explains how to do this.

Before this undertaking, be sure unique skins and page layouts are needed in the first place.  While the application supports setting these up, it comes with eventual overhead of maintaining x number of skins, components and layouts that house them.  A lot can be done to customize/brand pages within a corp main skin (and thus in the Admin) such as:

• Use of 'Welcome' component that houses an image/asset swapped in/out and unique at the Category level.
• Use of Custom Content modules that are node scoped and placed in a fixed position in the right rail.
• Use of OOB components that are node scoped by default (such as leader boards, recent posts, etc).
• Use of freemarker in custom components to show different content based on rank/role or authentication in the same module.

These considerations are especially important if expansion is needed for the Community down the road.  The design barrier to spinning up a new, branded Category is reduced to a few assets instead of everything detailed above.

Hope this serves as a solid basis for the how and why.

Cheers, 

scott