Using Portal Designer
Use Portal Designer to change the appearance of your portal.
Upon opening your portal project, you will see the Portal Designer editor in the center of the workbench. The following views surround it: Project Explorer, Outline and Thumbnails, Properties, and Palette.
Portal Designer
For portal site layout and appearance, you can think of Portal Designer as a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editor. It renders the graphic interface of items such as themes, skins, page layouts, ad Basic portlets.
Portal Designer also displays the initial pages of JSF and Struts portlets within your portal pages. Portal Designer will not display the content for WSRP remote portlets. For more information on how to display Basic portlets, refer to Viewing portlets in Portal Designer
The Portal Configuration is the name of the layout source file that resides in the root of your portal project folder.
Use this editor to customize both the graphic design of your portal and the layout of your portal pages. Use it as you would use any WYSIWYG web editor. Functions you can perform include:
- Right-clicking a design element and selecting an
Insert menu item
- Clicking on a design element to edit its properties. Scroll down to read more about working with properties
- Using Page Designer to alter the graphic design of themes, skins and styles. These editors are available in the
Edit menu.
The Project Explorer view
Project Explorer
When you open your portal project, the Project Explorer opens by default in the upper left-hand corner of your screen. Use this view to navigate the file structure of your portal.
When you expand a portal project folder, the Portal Configuration appears as a node in the project root. If a portal project has portlets associated with it, the portlets will appear as children of the Portal Configuration node.
Each project's EAR folder appears as it's own project in the Project Explorer.
Outline and Thumbnails views
In the Web perspective, the Outline and Thumbnails views appear in the lower left-hand corner of Portal Designer editor. The Outline view appears by default when you open your portal project. It displays three root nodes:
The Layout and Content Root nodes aid in defining both the page layout and the navigation of your portal project. For more information, refer to Defining layouts.
- Elements - expand this node to view and select non-visual elements for editing in the Properties view.
- Layout - each page in your project appears off of the root of this node. Expand a page node to see the hierarchy of its contents (i.e. columns, rows, portlets, etc.)
- Content Root - For WebSphere® Portal v6.0 portal projects, is the root navigation node. The Home label, Task Page Definitions page, Login page and Edit My Profile page are its child nodes. You can edit each one in Portal Designer.
The Thumbnails view works in conjunction with both the Theme and Skin nodes that appear within your portal project folder. For more information, refer to the Project Explorer views section on this page.
To view thumbnails of your themes and skins:
- Click either the Themes or Skins folder from the list.
- Below the Project Explorer view, surface the Thumbnails view. You will see thumbnail images of either your themes or skins.
You can drag and drop a theme thumbnail onto a Label or a Page (See Changing themes), or you can drag and drop a skin thumbnail onto a portlet. (See Changing skins).
Properties view
The Properties view appears at the bottom of the screen under the Portal Designer editor. Depending on which design element you choose, either within the Outline view or the Portal Designer editor, the properties view will change to reflect the options that you can edit for that element.
Palette
This view is located along the right-hand margin of the interface.
When designing the layout of your portal page, you can insert one of these items to your Portal site by dragging it to the Portal Designer editor.
Limitations and accessibility
Portal Designer has the following limitations:
- Access Control - Portal Designer does not support access control. For instance, if you create a page and want to show it to only a limited number of people, you will have first deploy the portal application to the server, then use the admin portlet to set the access rights to the page.
- Accessibility - When using Portal Designer, screen readers such as JAWS will not be able to read the correct label or page name from within the portal configuration editor. The best practice is to access page and label features from within the Outline view, which resides to the lower left of the portal configuration editor.
Related concepts
Defining Portal nodes and elements
Related tasks
Adding portlets to portal pages
Related information