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Customization Options For Paper Lantern in upcoming 11.46

cPanelAdamF
Yesterday my team and I unveiled the new Customization options we've been working on for Paper Lantern. Our latest work has been pushed to our demo server - The full capability of CSS3 is now available. Your style developer won't throttle you for making them use ancient techniques. They might even purr a little when they crack open the code and see Twitter Bootstrap DOM structures to work with. Heck, you might even be able to re-use the same stylesheet-and-assets from your company website as a style for cPanel.
  • Don't like our icons? You can now replace it with one you provide...or turn it off entirely with 1 CSS rule.
  • Style directories can now be stored in version control. Simply check-out/clone your VCS repo into the correct place and away you go.
  • Theme and Style management APIs now enable the remote management of an account's Theme and Style settings. If you need to automate the move to Paper Lantern, it's totally scriptable.
  • Plugin maintainers can now deeply integrate their project into Paper Lantern, using all of the same theme and styles as Paper Lantern does. Even more is on the way, so please do stay tuned. Here's roughly what the horizon looks like: [LIST]
  • We know that it's very common for our customers to inject content into the interface so we're creating the means to do this simply and easily. Expect support for simple content (html, css, js), flash embeds, javascript single-page-applications, access to our API and more.
  • A customization control panel interface in WHM for changing common customization settings. Company name, logo, colors, support information, etc.
  • Lots of bug fixes are on the way for the mobile responsiveness of Paper Lantern. ...after that list, we get into the fun stuff like new features and workflows.

    • Comments

    35 comments

    Date Votes
    • MaraBlue
      A quick question. I haven't started doing any customizations to Paper Lantern, and yet on a VPS the top logo: /http://[hostname]/cPanel_magic_revision_1396572781/frontend/paper_lantern/branding/top-logo_vps2.png is mostly black with a transparent background (except for the orange cPanel name), on a black header background. Part of that PNG extends past the bottom line of the header, which would be fine if it were on a different colored background. As it is, it looks like a mistake. .vB Is this how it was designed/meant to be?
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    • cPanelAdamF
      nope, that's a bug. Expect that to be resolved in an upcoming regular nightly update.
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    • MaraBlue
      Awesome. :)
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    • MaraBlue
      [quote="cPanelAdamF, post: 1688251">nope, that's a bug. Expect that to be resolved in an upcoming regular nightly update.
      Hey Adam.... it was fixed a few days ago (the header background was changed to gray), and now it's back to black on black....
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    • markb14391
      Paper Lantern Menu Hi, Is there any way to customize the links that appear at the top of Paper Lantern? Some of our users don't understand why there is a menu there with a few items which seem to have been arbitrarily chosen. For example, many of our users never touch add-on domains. Thanks, Mark [COLOR="silver">- - - Updated - - - Also, is there a way to fix the cPanel VPS Optimized logo in Paper Lantern? It hangs down into the top menu (which includes add-on domains and such). It looks a bit unprofessional.
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    • markb14391
      Yep, the VPS Optimized logo looks bad for me too. Is there any way to upload our own logo here?
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    • MaraBlue
      It is back to a gray background this morning....so there's that. :)
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    • markb14391
      Re: Paper Lantern Menu Also, the upper right menus look odd too, like CSS isn't populating properly or something. And some of the icon text (in the various sections) is truncated at the bottom.
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    • markb14391
      A little help here? ;-) Would like to use Paper Lantern but in its current state we can't...the logo alone looks too unprofessional, we don't want our users to think their cPanel is broken.
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    • MaraBlue
      Mark, there's another thread about Paper Lantern, which details how to go about customizations. I don't have it off-hand, but I'm sure it can be found in the search. Also, I may be wrong, but I believe Paper Lantern is more-or-less still in BETA.
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    • markb14391
      Hi, thanks for the reply. However, I believe that thread basically says that you can't really change anything yet. :-( I think you are right about it being beta, though the release notes for each new cPanel version make it sound ready for production. And, in a blog post, cPanel says: "Paper Lantern has a new goal: It must be 100% usable in every release of cPanel & WHM. Since its introduction in cPanel & WHM version 11.42, Paper Lantern has met these goals and more." So, cPanel, please tell me how to make it 100% usable. ;-) Thanks, Mark
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    • MaraBlue
      [quote="markb14391, post: 1696101">So, cPanel, please tell me how to make it 100% usable. ;-)
      I'll admit, this is relevant to my interests as well.... :)
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    • cPanelAdamF
      A fix for the VPS optimized logo is in 11.44.1, which is in EDGE and CURRENT right now. It'll head to RELEASE soon. As I said before, we're aiming to have customization support in Paper Lantern for the 11.46 release. This includes the style stuff I mentioned in OP as well as the custom content work and a few other things in support of customization.
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    • markb14391
      Customization Options For Paper Lantern Thanks for the logo fix! Any ETA on the 11.44 features? Just want to plan...
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    • cPanelAdamF
      Actually our release team pushed 11.44.1 to RELEASE last night (at 10pm Houston Time). Depending on when your system checks for updates, the fix may have been applied last night. Have a look and let me know.
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    • markb14391
      Yep, I did notice that. We run RELEASE and the logo fix was there last night. :-) Any ETA on 11.46 with the customization features?
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    • cPanelAdamF
      We go into feature freeze for 11.46 in the middle of August. After that, it's a matter of polishing up a release candidate and our QA team having a thorough look over everything. If they don't find anything, then we'll set an official date for release. Sorry that's really all I can say as far as schedule goes. We think that it's more important for us to release stable software than to stick to a schedule. If you'd like, you can switch your WHM " Update Preferences setting to EDGE. We'll be releasing over the EDGE tier at some point in time after the feature freeze but before official release so that people can help us vet it. (We won't be ready to call it production-ready until after our QA procedures complete though, so please don't use an EDGE build in production.)
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    • MaraBlue
      Stable is worth waiting for, IMO. ;-)
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    • markb14391
      Adam, thank you for those details. Sounds good!
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    • baritoneuk
      My host has updated my server to 11.44 and I've managed to find how to update some of our accounts to use Paper Lantern. What an improvement! Looks great! Did you say you were using Bootstrap 3? I've been using rvskin to customise the look and feel of accounts and webmail, but I find it difficult to use. Can I use paper lantern instead to add our logo and other bits to cPanel and webmail? Does the Paper Lantern theme work for the webmail interface? Most of our clients don't use cPanel- just webmail. Are there any plans to roll this theme to WHM? I love the clean and uncluttered feel and it would be great if WHM looked like this too. How do I customise paper lantern to add our logo and other links? Can this be done for all accounts and packages that use Paper Lantern?
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    • Chris Vendilli
      Can't wait for an easy way to create a custom paper lantern theme that I can apply to all of our clients right from WHM. keeping an eye on this thread to see when it's ready.
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    • cPanelAdamF
      More news regarding customizations for Paper Lantern: [url=http://blog.cpanel.net/customizing-paper-lantern/]Customizing Paper Lantern | cPanel Blog
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    • markb14391
      New customization options look great. Does that announcement mean that these options work on our servers (if we create the files in the right locations), or is that capability only on the demo server?
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    • cPanelAdamF
      No, this new customization option is for the upcoming 11.46 release. [quote="markb14391, post: 1723981">New customization options look great. Does that announcement mean that these options work on our servers (if we create the files in the right locations), or is that capability only on the demo server?
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    • 3zzy
      I want to customize the theme significantly, is there *any* way I could do it locally instead of having to SFTP?
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    • cPanelAdamF
      Paper Lantern is implemented using the DOM structures which Twitter Bootstrap expects. There are a few custom DOM elements here and there in addition to the bootstrap-expected DOM but you should be able to get 85% of the way through a Style for Paper Lantern simply by working locally against a Bootstrap Kitchen Sink (like [url=http://codepen.io/giao/details/bBxpt]Bootstrap 3 - Kitchen Sink).
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    • baritoneuk
      Hi, I'm not sure if my earlier questions were answered.... 1) Does the Paper Lantern theme work for the webmail interface? Most of our clients don't use cPanel- just webmail. 2) Are there any plans to roll this theme to WHM? I love the clean and uncluttered feel and it would be great if WHM looked like this too. 3) How do I customise paper lantern to add our logo and other links? Can this be done for all accounts and packages that use Paper Lantern? -- I looked at the article entitled Customizing Paper Lantern but it doesn't really tell me how to customise things. It says "The Change Styles interface, located in the User Preference menu..." but where is the User Preference menu? Thanks!
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    • cPanelAdamF
      [quote="baritoneuk, post: 1724992"> 1) Does the Paper Lantern theme work for the webmail interface? Most of our clients don't use cPanel- just webmail.
      Currently, no. We are gearing up to make this a reality though. [quote="baritoneuk, post: 1724992">2) Are there any plans to roll this theme to WHM? I love the clean and uncluttered feel and it would be great if WHM looked like this too.
      In the long term, yes. A team is currently investigating what that would take. [quote="baritoneuk, post: 1724992">3) How do I customise paper lantern to add our logo and other links? Can this be done for all accounts and packages that use Paper Lantern?
      With 11.46, There will be a 'Customize Paper Lantern' (name may change) page inside WHM which allows you to provide company information, logo and help/documentation links which Paper Lantern then uses. This works for the root user globally as well as for Resellers. By default, the cPanel logo is shown. If the user's reseller has such brand information, we use that. If the user's reseller does not have brand information, but root DOES, we use that. Sort of a fallback mechanism. [quote="baritoneuk, post: 1724992">-- I looked at the article entitled Customizing Paper Lantern but it doesn't really tell me how to customise things. It says "The Change Styles interface, located in the User Preference menu..." but where is the User Preference menu?

      .vB
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    • baritoneuk
      Thanks so much- that is really helpful. Great that you're planning on having paper lantern for webmail- any ideas of when this could happen? We don't give any of our clients cPanel access- only webmail, so it is more important for us. It would be great if WHM had a paper lantern UI- it would make it easier to navigate and use. So, I'll have to wait until 11.46 for the customize feature, that's fine. I'm not seeing all the items in the drop down menu, for example "Change style". Not sure why that is the case.
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    • cPanelAdamF
      yeah, don't worry about the lack of "change style" in the version of Paper Lantern you're looking at. The screenshot is what it will look like in 11.46 ;-)
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