SOLVED
Customizing Communities UI - How does We.Retail do it?
Hello everyone,
I'm tracing through the source to figure out how the We.Retail communities site customizes its UI and I generally see how it's doing it, except for one key piece.
In /libs/social/console/components/hbs/sitepage/sitepage.hbs around line 20, there's the following code:
{{#if pageProperties.page-template}}
{{include this template=pageProperties.page-template}}
{{else}}
...
{{/if}
For We.Retail, pageProperties.page-template is set to "weretail". This, in turn resolves to:
/apps/social/console/components/hbs/sitepage/weretail.hbs
...thereby giving the page the opportunity to completely redress itself but still adhere to the Community Site wizard control and configurations.
Where does pageProperties.page-template get its value of "weretail"??
I've run out of places to look. 
It seems as though there are two approaches one can take to do a Communities integration:
1) Use the wizard (seemingly the recommended route)
2) Drop the various components onto various pages.
#1 means you can control the functions of the site through the Communities site wizard, #2 means you lose this control, but you get a lot more control over the UI.
Regardless of which route you take, the standard options of overlay vs. extension apply for further modifying the output should the theming (CSS) modifications not suffice.
What We.Retail is doing seems to be a quasi-overlay with its specific hbs script in /apps/social/console/components/hbs/sitepage, but without affecting the baseline behavior all over. This is excellent.
How is pageProperties.page-template set so I can take advantage of this myself?
Thanks for any insight! (AEM 6.3)
Garth
1 Accepted Solution
