Links

Customize Exchange

📺 Watch on Youtube!: Rebranding & Customization
The exchange doesn't really feel special until you make it your own way. This goes from your logo, icons, content, and color themes to adding extra features, functionalities, or even new pages to the site.
The good news is that the HollaEx Kit is very customizable and you can pretty much achieve most ideas you have in mind with a bit of work. There are not many restrictions to take the exchange really far in terms of customization and you can find more information and common points here.
Common customization methods are divided into the 3 following options:
  • Operator controls
  • Plugin
  • Forked repository

Operator controls

Operator control, known as the blue admin panel, is built into the HollaEx Kit exchange and provides a variety of options to customize your exchange. The exchange admin can customize all strings, icons/images as well as themes directly through Edit Mode at the bottom left of your exchange page.
You can read about some of these customizations here.
There are many general exchange configurations such as the exchange name, country, terms of service, privacy policy, and many more within Operator controls. You need to spend some time going through the whole Operator controls and make all high-level business-level customization and adjustments there.
As an admin, you can take it one step further by using the Console which allows you to directly add HTML code into your website's <head> and <body> tags.
The code added in the console is injected and run during the website's loading. While the site loads just fine in most browsers, there may be some limitations for this method using old crawlers and browsers.
Cloud exchanges have an SEO section. Adding custom code there is more standard compared to using Console since the code in Cloud SEO is added statically during the exchange build process and is embedded in the website.
As an example, adding the following code in the <BODY> of the console tab would change the font to Times New Roman.
<style>
body
{
font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif !important;
}
</style>
There are limitless options here and you can add any styles and scripts into the Console directly.

Plugin

The customization in the operator control is limited in terms of the user interface and user flow and has limitations if you want to add custom logic to your exchange. For example, if you want to add a custom KYC or a fiat deposit to your exchange, plugins are the way to go.
Plugins are JSON files that can easily be installed into your exchange through the Operator Controls -> Plugins -> Install third party. You can check how to use and install them here.
In order to develop a custom plugin, you can use hollaex-plugin-starter to get started and there are a few examples already there. hello-exchange and kyc plugins are two good examples you can find there. The final version of a KYC plugin would look like this. All server-side code is included in the server.js which is minified in the final plugin JSON in a field called script. The Web components are in /web folder. Once you build a web bundle you need to provide the link of that in the web_view of your plugin. Check out here to fully understand how web_view works and how to develop one.
The JSON file of the plugin has some metadata such as version , name author bio etc. There are two fields called meta and public_meta . meta is used for configuring private variables for the plugin such as secret keys while public_meta is used for public variables such as a URL or an image etc. These variables are provided in the configure section of the plugin in the Operator controls so once the plugin is installed, the admin can change them dynamically, so we recommend you to put your constant variables using these methods instead of hardcoding them in your script.
You can read about all the fields in the plugin JSON here.
In Develop plugins we have all the information required to get your development journey started with plugins.

Forked Repository

This method is basically a complete manual customization of the source code. You need to fork the HollaEx Kit and make your custom changes to the source code.
If you are a cloud exchange user, you can connect your forked exchange in the customization section of the dashboard.
By forking HollaEx Kit and changing the code base, you can no longer easily upgrade your exchange and will need to manually pull and merge conflicts.
This method is not recommended unless you have some expertise and understand the side effects and consequences.