Graphic design is definitely not my forte, but I think I have finally wrangled it as well as the overall look & feel of the "Catholic Portal".

"Skinning" Vufind is not terribly difficult. Using a sort of inheritance, the implementor creates a hierarchy of directories where Vufind will look for customized output views before falling back to a default theme coming with the distribution. I was having one heck of a time getting the search results to display correctly. After looking solutions in all the wrong places, I finally copied a version of the Blueprint theme's results.tpl file to my local themes directory. After tweaking it a bit, and after refreshing Vufind's cache and compile directories, things started to line up. As an extra bonus, things like Google, Internet Archive, and HathiTrust snippet views were also being displayed. The "book bag" feature now works as well. Whew!

That said, it requires quite a number of skills in order for Vufind to be implemented properly. They include but are not limited to subject experts, systems administrators, computer programmers, usability technicians, graphic designers, metadata experts, administrators of people, public service personnel, etc.

sample screen dump of "Catholic Portal" search results