The theme and template engine in Active Social allows for endless customization of the module. All of the different views have their own templates, written in HTML. To successfully customize the module, you will need a good understanding of HTML, CSS and the DotNetNuke file structure. It would also help to be familiar with ASP.NET server controls, but this is not entirely necessary.

You can find the template and theme files inside the /DesktopModules/ActiveSocial/themes directory. Before you begin editing a theme, please make a backup copy of the default theme. You can edit any of these templates using a standard text/html editor.

When customizing Active Social, you should begin by making yourself familiar with the structure of the default templates. Some of the templates have sub-templates represented with tokens. A token is a word surrounded by brackets, i.e. [AS:PROFILE]. Tokens are used to replace complex code or other objects. This allows you to place a token anywhere and get the full features, without having to understand any of the code behind it. Any token that starts with [RESX: is used to replace text on the page. You can change the value of the text using the DNN Language editor.