Clearspace documentation includes content on installing, administering, and using Clearspace.
Be sure to visit the Jive Software web site for additional information about Clearspace.
For the latest developer content and answers to development questions, visit the Developers guide on Jivespace.
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Recommended Environments for Clearspace Deployments Clearspace runs best on recommended hardware and environmental configurations. Use this document as a starting place for estimating what you'll need to support your deployment. |
Look here for information on installation steps, including for each of the components you'll need. |
You can upgrade to this version of Clearspace with these guidelines for each distribution. |
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LDAP and Active Directory Guide When you have your own LDAP or Active Directory repository, you can configure Clearspace to integrate with it. |
This guide describes the clustering model through which Clearspace run over a group of servers. |
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If you're a system administrator, use this guide to set up and configure Clearspace using the admin console. |
Fine-Tuning Clearspace Performance Through adjustments to caches, JVM settings, and more, you can make sure that Clearspace is performing well. |
Through a simple user interface, you can change the site-wide logo and colors. This guide describes the basic, point-and-click way to customize the site's user interface. |
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If you're a system admin, user admin, or group admin, use this brief guide to learn how to use the admin console to add, remove, and edit accounts for users and groups. |
System properties configure Clearspace with application-wide settings. Some of the settings correspond to configuration elements in the admin console user interface. |
With Community Everywhere, you can embed discussion threads directly into existing news articles, blog posts or other content that would benefit from comments or discussions. |
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Use this guide to learn about how to localize your Clearspace installation. |
Use this guide to learn about the feeds (RSS and Atom) that Clearspace makes available. |
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If you're a space or system administrator, use this guide to learn about how to create and configure spaces, including setting up defaults for content and managing discussions and documents. |
If you're a space or system administrator, use this guide to learn about granting permissions to people for access to content and administrative features.
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Someone assigned as a space's moderator can edit, approve or reject content before the content is published and visible to others. |
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Use this tour to get a step-by-step view of some of the things you can do with Clearspace. |
Use this list of frequently asked questions to get help on how to do things in Clearspace. For a step-by-step tour of Clearspace, be sure to see the Clearspace Quick Tour. |
You can easily get some of the pages in Clearspace to look the way you want to by using widgets to choose and arrange content. |
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Most of the time, you just want to find content that has a particular phrase. Here are the three easiest steps to get what you want: |
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Clearspace Application Architecture This high-level overview of Clearspace technologies provides links to more information about the pieces themselves. |
By building plugins, you can add new features to Clearspace. This includes new widgets and other UI features, as well as back-end components such as web services or custom authentication providers. |
This introduction gives you the basics on building macros -- tools to make it easier for people to add and format content through the content editor. Using the macros included by default, people can insert a document table of contents, quote selected text, and format text as special syntax such as Java and XML. |
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This introduction gives you the basics on building widgets -- views for displaying content oncustomizable Clearspace pages. |
Widgets: Frequently Asked Questions Answers to questions on developing and manipulating widgets. |
You can build plugins that enhance Clearspace with links to new functionality, additions to the admin console, and additions to the end user UI. |
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Integrating Action User Interface You can integrate your plugins into the Clearspace user interface by overriding and adding to the UI components that Clearspace defines by default. |
UI Components: Frequently Asked Questions This is a simple XML-driven way to configure the UI of Clearspace. Using an XML file called ui-components.xml allows you to define tabs, user bar, actions available, navigation for the application and admin console. |
Themes are a great way to make changes to the Clearspace user interface when you don't need to add new functionality. With themes, you can customize the application's look and feel with your logo, colors, and typefaces. |
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Themes: Frequently Asked Questions Answers about themes, the Clearspace way to make user interface changes. |
Customizing UI with the Theme Resource Kit If you need to add sophisticated view logic in your header or footer, you can do more ambitious site-wide theming by starting with the Clearspace resource kit. It includes a set of sample files you can tailor to your needs. |
You can build advanced themes that add or change CSS classes, map to specific parts of the UI, and change the structure of pages. The topics linked below describe how. |
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Mapping Themes to the Clearspace UI As you plan your customizations, their scope will mean a lot. Do you want the changes to be seen across the UI, only in a particular community, or only in selected patches of the UI reached by certain URLs? The scope decision will be one of the first you make. |
Creating Custom CSS Classes in Themes You can customize the CSS of your Clearspace instance by adding or overriding CSS classes in a custom CSS FTL template file. You create a theme, create the custom template, add your CSS classes to the template, then map the theme to the UI. |
Substituting Phrases in the UI You can give other names to things people see in the user interface. For example, you can rename "Documents" and "Discussions" to "Articles" and "Conversations." You can make the substitutions in a simple way for the most common terms. There's also a more detailed way to do it. |
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You change the structure of a Clearspace page by customizing the Freemarker FTL template file that the page is rendered from. An FTL file defines the order of UI elements on a page (or a section of a page), along with the data displayed on the page. The custom template is part of a theme that you map to the user interface. |
Clearspace FTL Templates and Descriptions Here's a list of the FTL files you can customize when creating your theme. Each FTL file corresponds to a part of the Clearspace user interface. In other words, to add text or HTML markup to the blog actions sidebar, you add it to template/blogs/view-sidebar.ftl. These files are listed in the admin console when you're editing a theme. |
These suggestions and best practices can help make your work a little easier and help you avoid pitfalls. |
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This topic includes links to other information about technologies related to Clearspace themes. |
Authentication and Authorization Clearspace has multiple facilities to handle the three primary facets of network application security. This topic will discuss each and highlight APIs commonly of interest to developers customizing Clearspace installations. |
Example: Authentication and Authorization This topic provides an overview of common customizations for Clearspace 2.0 and later. You'll find code samples and common strategies for integrating with third-party authentication systems (integration commonly referred to as single sign-on, or SSO). |
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Security: Frequently Asked Questions Read Authentication and Authorization and then come back to this document. |
Accessing the Database from a Plugin You can add tables needed by your plugin to the Clearspace database. You do this by including a schema.xml file that describes the schema of your additions and by defining a Spring bean that represents access to the data from your Java code. |
Database: Frequently Asked Questions Answers to questions about Jive's use of JDBC, transactions, and other database tools. |
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This document list the web services that Clearspace exposes via REST, or Representational State Transfer. This guide includes the following sections: |
SOAP Web Services Development Guide If you're looking to use SOAP-style web services to access Clearspace, this basic information can get you started. |
Web Services: A Security Primer This document is intended for anyone that needs to develop a client to access Clearspace 2.5.x web services. |
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Use this guide to learn about how to localize your Clearspace installation. |
This document describes tables in the Clearspace database. |
Upgrading Extensions to Version 2 Here's a run down of the changes you might need to make to get Clearspace customizations written for version 1 working on version 2. This topic looks at upgrading actions, macros, widgets, themes, and web services (client and server components), and other customizations. |
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This reference describes the elements and attributes that make up a plugin's configuration XML file. |
This reference describes the elements and attributes through which you can can UI components to Clearspace. You use the elements described here in a plugin.xml file. |
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Feeds: Frequently Asked Questions Answers to questions on consuming and creating feeds from Clearspace. |
Here are some resources, references, and APIs you will find helpful in modifying or consuming feeds in Clearspace. |
FreeMarker: Frequently Asked Questions FreeMarker is the template framework used for Clearspace user interface. |
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Spring: Frequently Asked Questions Clearspace uses various pieces of the Spring framework for dependency injection, security, data access, and more. |
Struts: Frequently Asked Questions Answers to questions on Jive's use of Struts, an open framework for supporting a model-view-controller architecture. |
Jive Software offers a Secure repository with credentialed access for partners and licensed customers wishing to do extensive custom development on Clearspace. |
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Step-by-step instructions for getting Maven up and running to support your Clearspace development. |
settings.xml - For Licensed Customers and Partners Note: this Maven configuration provides access to Clearspace binaries and sources via the maven-secure.jivesoftware.com server; it requires login access. See the bottom of the document where to put your login information. |
Maven: How To Create a New Maven Project This document will walk you through creating a new project with Maven. You'll only need to go through this process once per project, at its inception. |
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This document covers the basic build-run-compile steps Jive recommends when using the Maven build. This assumes you've already looked at Maven: Start Here, How-To: Install Maven, and Maven: How To Create a New Maven Project . |
Maven: How to Debug Clearspace You'll want to create separate configurations depending on if you're using Tomcat or Jetty, one for each port you connect to. |
This document provides the steps for opening and running your new project with IDEA. It assumes you have already set up your Maven project from the command line, using these steps: Maven: How To Create a New Maven Project . |
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A quick reference to Maven commands. |