• creating a custom theme based on the WebSphere Portal 7.0.0.2 theme ·

    Recently at work I was tasked with creating a customized Portal theme based on the new 7.0.0.2 theme, which uses Dojo 1.6 and thus supports IE9. I followed all of IBM’s steps for making a copy of the 7.0.0.2 theme’s static files (the non-JSP stuff that you can access via WebDAV), but still my custom 7.0.0.2 wouldn’t load for me. I didn’t modify anything in my copy from the original except the metadata to change the theme name. When I would select my copy as a page’s theme or the Portal default theme, I would just get a white page with a snippet of XML up top, sometimes including an error message. When I checked the Portal logs, I saw error messages pertaining to PageBuilder2–what? PageBuilder2 is the old Portal theme, and the new 7.0.0.2 theme didn’t seem to mention PageBuilder2 anywhere. If you’re experiencing this, here’s what I did to fix it.