Customization
Customize the user's portal experience is one of the main goals of WebSphere Portal. To achieve this, WebSphere Portal provides user and administrative portlets for customizing content and the look and layout of pages.
This topic is divided into the following subtopics:
Customize portal pages
Users can have one or more custom pages and access each one through a different portal page. A page can contain a group of pages that is organized for a specific purpose. Each page can have a different set of portlets. Depending on authorizations, users can change the look and feel of their pages by using skins and page layouts. Also, page navigation hierarchy is tree-based, allowing any depth of nested pages.
The contents of each page can be set by the user or by an administrator. Administrators can specify that certain portlets be required, so that users are unable to move them or to remove them from the pages. Each page can have its own color scheme and column layout.
Users now have the ability to rearrange portlets on a page right on the page itself, using the Show Tools option. Clicking this option exposes controls on the page around each portlet, allowing the user to adjust the position of the portlet on the page, and add or remove portlets from the page.
Cascading authorization
The permission to grant or revoke access to customize a page or portion of a page can be delegated from a portal administrator to other portal administrators or users. The right to modify a page can be determined by the administrator. Administrators can control the edit authority that other administrators have on a page and its contents. This is best explained through an example.
The first administrator can determine that a page will have two columns and not allow the column layout to be modified by any other administrators.
Another administrator with lesser access cannot modify the column layout but can add portlets to these columns. This administrator adds a company news portlet to column one and a stock portlet to column two. This administrator wants these portlets to be available to everyone and does not want them removed. However, additional portlets can be added to the columns. Therefore, the portlets are locked and cannot be removed by other administrators with lesser access.
Skins and themes
WebSphere Portal uses Java Server Page (JSP) templates, cascading style sheets, and images to define the look of pages. These can be modified to control visual aspects of the portal, perhaps to add company-specific brand elements or to achieve a different color scheme and visual style. The system for defining color themes and portal skins supports multiple skins per theme, additional branding elements, navigation styles, and dynamic, browser-independent cascading style sheets.
Skins and themes can be applied to a page, not only to the overall portal. Different skins can be applied individually to portlets as well, so that the appearance of a portal can be fine-tuned to meet any user need. By using a different theme for each page, a single portal installation can give the appearance of supporting many "virtual" portals.
Branding elements
All of the visual elements of WebSphere Portal, including the masthead, the navigation areas, graphics, portlet title areas, and style sheets, can be changed to give the portal a custom look. Standard file formats, such as JPEG, GIF, CSS, and JSP files, are used for defining the look and layout of the portal.
The structure of the WebSphere Portal component installation folder contains folders named "skin" and "theme", with folders "html", "wml", and "chtml". These folders contain most of the files that are used for defining the basic structure of the portal home page, its color schemes, and portlet decorations. Portal designers can copy these folders and modify their contents to create a custom look and feel. The theme administration portlet registers the new files.
Universal access
The system of page templates, themes, skins, and portlet rendering is fully enabled for internationalization and accessibility by people with disabilities. For globally accessible portals, WebSphere Portal searches for and selects the proper JSP pages, based on the target browser and its settings for language and country.
See also