First, please note that per this article, we do not provide technical support for, nor any assistance with, any type of Centova Cast modifications.  Modifying the Centova Cast interface may interfere with the operation of Centova Cast, and cause issues to arise which may appear to be unrelated to your modifications.  Should our support representatives feel that your modifications are interfering with the proper operation of Centova Cast, we reserve the right to discontinue technical support for any issues you experience with Centova Cast after modifications are made.

Also note that this article is intended for users who want to apply advanced customizations to the Centova Cast user interface; if you only want to replace the Centova Cast logo with your own, please see this article instead: How do I apply my own logo to Centova Cast?

Having said that, we have made the following tips available for customers wishing to customize Centova Cast at their own risk:


Basics

The Centova Cast user interface (UI) is based entirely on XHTML+CSS.  You (or your web developer) will need to be reasonably familiar with XHTML and CSS in order to customize or rebrand the UI.

The Centova Cast UI has been designed to use a tableless, CSS-based layout.  This allows you to make a wide range of changes -- from simple logo replacements, to drastically altering the appearance of the UI -- by editing only the CSS files, and without modifying a single line of XHTML code.


File Locations

Centova Cast's UI is separated into two portions:

• Theme files: These are XHTML templates and CSS files stored in the theme/ subdirectory of your Centova Cast web interface directory.  These are used to change the overall appearance and page layout of Centova Cast's user/admin areas and login page.  Most customers will only need to modify these files to rebrand the Centova Cast UI.
  
  
• System templates: These are XHTML templates stored in the system/templates/ subdirectory of your Centova Cast web interface directory.  These files are used by Centova Cast to display output from all of its internal features, ranging from account lists to configuration editing and so-on.  These files are intended for internal use and tend to contain more advanced template markup.  Incorrect modification of these files can easily break the Centova Cast UI, so we strongly recommend that you avoid modifying these files.
  

Theme File Descriptions

Inside the Theme Files directory, you will find the following files:

style.css	The main stylesheet for the Centova Cast user/admin UI. You can customize the vast majority of Centova Cast's appearance using this stylesheet.
ie.css	An add-on stylesheet used only for Internet Explorer. Allows IE-specific styles to be applied to the Centova Cast UI.
login.css	The main stylesheet for the Centova Cast login page. You can customize the vast majority of the login page's appearance using this stylesheet.
playlist.css	The stylesheet for the playlist editor. Note that this file is subject to change (and expected to change in the near future with the introduction of our new playlist editor).
templates/page.tpl	The main XHTML layout file for the Centova Cast user/admin UI. This defines the overall XHTML markup used to format the Centova Cast user/admin UI.
templates/login.tpl	The main XHTML layout file for the Centova Cast login page. This defines the overall XHTML markup used to format the Centova Cast login page.
templates/navigation_block.tpl	The XHTML layout file used to format "blocks" of content in the left-hand column of the Centova Cast user/admin UI.

System Template Descriptions

The system templates are intended for internal use by Centova Cast, and are thus not documented at this time.  If you feel that you must modify these templates, the filenames for each are reasonably self-explanatory.


Template Guide

If you are an advanced user and need to make more advanced modifications to the templates (and more specifically, to the template markup), please download the DirecTemplate Template Author's Guide from the Centova Cast Documentation Page.  This provides advanced developer documentation for the template markup used by DirecTemplate, the template library used internally by Centova Cast.