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Mirage has been the default XMLUI theme since DSpace 1.7 and has been used as base point for most custom themes. DSpace 5 includes Mirage 2, also developed by by @mire, an upgrade to Mirage built on modern web technologies. The predominant improvement for the end user is the responsive design. Repository admins and developers will also benefit because of the tools available to make both simple and advanced customizations.

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A responsive website is a website that rearranges its content to fit in different screen sizes. The main focus is to provide a better overall user experience whether you're browsing on a mobile phone, a tablet or desktop computer. As opposed to using a separate mobile theme, there's only one version of the website that will work everywhere. A simply way to find out what the differences are between a narrow screen and a larger screen in Mirage 2, go to any webpage and resize the browser window. You will notice the sidebar is only shown when the window is large enough, otherwise a menu button is displayed to get to the sidebar options. The theme provides a distinct look for each of the 3 different categories of screen sizes: mobile, tablet and desktop.

The build process

The modern web technologies that power Mirage 2 include a precompiler (compass), a package manager (bower) and a task runner (grunt). These tools can only be installed when some prerequisites are present on the system. DSpace's maven build process is capable of making a temporary installation of these dependencies just so the theme can be built. However the overall build time will be significantly shortened if these dependencies are installed on the system. More information on the prerequisites.

Configuration options

Mirage 2 adds two configuration options to dspace.cfg that affect the rendering of bitstream labels on item pages:

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Simple customizations imply that they only require custom css, e.g. changing the font or the logo. The theme's _styles.scss file is the right place for this. All the lines of css in this file will be included in the theme's style sheet. Even though it's a file with the scss extention, the usual lines of css will work just as well.

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