Editing Redmine's views manually

In its essence, Redmine is a Ruby on Rails web application, and it's open source. This means that you can edit its code, distribute it, or do anything else, as long as it complies with GNU General Public License v2 (GPL). So, for this recipe, we are going to add a company logo to the top left just below the top navigation row that contains Home and other links.

Getting ready

Make sure that you have access to the files and folders of your working Redmine installation.

How to do it…

Adding a company logo can be done in two ways. One is to customize the CSS theme and the other is to edit the base template manually. To edit the base template and add a logo or some other content, which will be visible on all pages, open /app/views/layouts/base.html.erb in your favorite code editor and find a line that looks like this:

  <h1><%= page_header_title %></h1>

Replace it with the following content:

<!--<h1><%= page_header_title %></h1>-->
     <img src="<%= Redmine::Utils.relative_url_root %>/images/logo.png" style="top-margin: 15px; left-margin: 15px;"/>

Save the file, upload your logo to /public/images, and name it logo.png. Restart Redmine, and you should see the logo on Redmine:

The alternative method would be to edit /public/stylesheets/application.css. Fi find a line that looks like #header {min-height:5.3em;margin:0;background-color:#628DB6;color:#f8f8f8; padding: 4px 8px 20px 6px; position:relative;}, and add your logo as a background image.

How it works…

As Redmine is a web application, it produces HTML code as the end result of its execution. In this recipe, we edited Redmine's source files that are used to render HTML content.

There's more…

You can also customize Redmine's terminology by editing the language files that are located in /config/locales/. So, for example, it's possible to use some different term, such as card instead of issue. Simply edit the en.yml file and replace all occurrences of issue that you don't like. The same goes for various kinds of alerts or messages from the system.

See also

Ruby on Rails tutorials, and the Redmine Developer Guide can be found at http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/Developer_Guide.

Additional customizations can be achieved through following plugin:

https://github.com/alexandermeindl/redmine_tweaks.