# Customizing Your Installation

Unless you're helping on the LiveJournal development team, you're probably running the LiveJournal Server for your own purposes and will want to customize its appearance, behavior, limits, and other settings to suit your needs. The next couple of chapters have been written with that aim in mind.

More importantly, however, the following sections tell you how to customize the installation in the supported way. Although you're welcome to just hack random parts up until it's working how you want it too, you'll run into trouble later when you try to stay in sync with the latest LiveJournal code.

By following these instructions, your life will be much easier, as all our tools assume you are doing things this way. If you end up not being able to change something, post in the lj_everywhere community on LiveJournal.com and ask for help. We'll either tell you the right way to do it, or add hooks/options such that you can.

&lj.customize.local_cvs; &lj.customize.images; &lj.customize.text; &lj.customize.limits; &lj.customize.hooks; &lj.customize.layout; &lj.customize.tasks;