Most OpenACS development involves customizations in one way or another. At the moment there does not exist a standard document on how to do customizations, but some general best practices have evolved. 

• Customize the layout
• Customize existing packages
• Upgrading product packages and layout
• Upgrading your packages (and how to write upgrade scripts) 

As you can see in the links above, a core feature of customization is to create a custom package for your webservice. The easiest way to achieve this is to create the page using the APM (Package Manager) of OpenACS.

These instructions require you to run at least version 5.6 of OpenACS. 

Create a custom package

Please login to your site at "http://127.0.0.1/acs-admin/apm". Assuming your locale is actually English you will see a link to "Create a new package" 

Here you have ample opportunity to fill out information about your package. Here are some recommendations:

• PackageKey should be your service name you choose for the website
• Package Name should be something like "service_name customizations"
• PackageType is "Application". Leave it at that
• It is not core, but it is a singleton (so check this off)
• You can leave the rest as it is

Make sure "Write a package specification file for this package." is still checked and hit "submit". Your custom package is created now.