This document explains how OFBiz handles screen estate. It will provide an overview of the OFBiz widget system. Understanding the custom widget system is a prerequisite if you want to chance the look and feel of screens in OFBiz. Not only the internal facing screens but also the eCommerce application (the Online store) uses the home-grown OFBiz widget system to render screens. As you probably don't want to run an online store with the default layout that OFBiz comes with, you will need to understand how the OFBiz widget system is designed in order to customize the look and feel of your shop.

There are a couple more scenarious where understanding the OFBiz widget system might be helpful, for example if:

• You intend to implement a different user interface technology for OFBiz, for example JSF, maybe in combination with AJAX.
• You want to adapt parts of the OFBiz UI for smaller screens, for example mobile phones. 

OFBiz uses a custom widget system, partially based on the FreeMarker templating engine (http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/). But when trying to understand how to customize both the look and feel as well as the content of screens in OFBiz, FreeMarker essentially comes last. You will need to get your mind around a couple more things before templating comes to play.

Overview

The 'what' and the 'how' 

There are two aspects to a screen:

• What data does it show.
• How does it present that data.

Make sure you are clear that "look and feel" only covers the latter aspect.