Customizing Sockso!

If you'd like to change how Sockso looks for your users, this page explains what you need to know. It's pretty simple to get started, so read this short guide and you should be ready to get going!

Sockso Structure

All Sockso's images, CSS, etc... are stored in the resources.jar file that you will find in the root directory. Jar files are just zip files with an extra manifest file, but you don't need to worry about that, lets get onto step 1

1 - Unpack the resources

Rename resources.jar to resources.zip, and then use a zip program like Winzip or 7-zip to extract the files to a folder in the root called resources,so you have a folder structure like this:

sockso
   resources
      htdocs
      icons
      images
      locales
      META-INF

(ignore the ResourcesAnchor files, just leave them untouched, don't delete them!)

Now when you start Sockso it'll use these files rather than those in resources.jar. You're ready to start customizing!

2 - Understanding the folders

The first folder htdocs is probably going to be the most interesting one when customizing Sockso. This folder contains all the CSS, Javascript and images used in the web interface. Just get in there and start playing around!

The icons and images folders contain the icons and images that are used by the GUI. The locales folder contains translation text used by Sockso for displaying different languages. The files are named sockso.LANG_CODE.txt, where LANG_CODE is the correct language code. Finally, the META-INF directory can be ignored (but don't delete it!)

With that information you should be able to play around with the images and the CSS and make your Sockso look however you like!

3 - Sharing your design

So now you have your new design, you may want to be able to share it with other Sockso users. So you'll first need to pack all the files in the resources directory back up into a .zip file, then rename back to .jar.

When you have your new customized resources file, you (or others) can put it back in the Sockso root directory named myResources.jar and Sockso will use that file instead of the normal resources.jar. NOTE: you will need to delete/rename the resources directory or Sockso will try and use that instead. The order Sockso looks for resources is as follows:

  1. resources directory
  2. myResources.jar
  3. resources.jar

So you can post your custom resources file online, maybe on the Sockso custom resources forum!

4 - Hacking Sockso

If you'd like to go one step further and really get into changing Sockso you're going to need to start hacking the code. Get over to the source code page and grab yourself a copy!