Removing blog themes from Lotus Connections

Today, Stuart McIntyre and I worked together to solve an issue that is not currently documented for Lotus Connections.  We wanted to remove one of the pre-installed blog themes.

The Lotus Connections InfoCenter has instructions on how to make a custom theme available to your users.

While these instructions tell you how to add a page, it does not address how to remove one of the built in themes.

Here is the procedure we worked out to remove an existing theme:

Turn on class reloading for the application on WebSphere

1. Log in to the WebSphere admin console
2. Expand Applications on the left
3. Click on Enterprise Applications
4. Click on the Blogs application
5. Click on Class loading and update detection
6. Check Reload classes when application files are updated
7. Enter a Polling interval for updated files. (I used 30 sec and then turned reload off when I was done.)
8. Click OK
9. Click Save to save your changes to the master configuration

Remove the theme files
Remove the associated theme directory from: /installedApps//Blogs.ear/blogs.war/themes

I suggest you simply move the theme directory to a back up location in case you want to restore it later.

Remove the theme from the Blogs properties files

1. Find the resource file: /installedApps//Blogs.ear/blogs.war/WEB-INF/classes/ApplicationResources.properties. 
2. Locate the #themes section of the file and enter a # in front of the theme directory name in the format: #ventura.theme.yourThemeDirectoryName. For example, ventura.theme.MyTheme=My Theme.
3. Repeat for any ApplicationResources.en_properties and any other relevant language files.

Restart the application

1. Log in to the WebSphere admin console
2. Expand Applications on the left
3. Click on Enterprise Applications
4. Click on the checkbox for the Blogs application
5. Click Stop
6. Click on the checkbox for the Blogs application
7. Click Start
   

Enjoy!