Customizing the portal
You must first understand the composition of the portal page
and how the page elements are aggregated before creating your custom portal
site. Make sure that you have read the Layout of the portal page section
before starting any of the tasks that are described in this section.
- Creating a new theme
- Using the color palette in themes
- Creating a new skin
- Performance guidelines for themes and skins
After installation, IBM® WebSphere® Portal Express provides a default theme and skin that demonstrate the server's rich set of functions. If your site does not require all of the functionality provided by the shipped themes and skins, you can realize performance benefits by selectively removing some of those functions.
- Enabling automatic JSP reloading
- Supporting new clients
- Supporting new markup languages
- Portal style classes
- Changing text information
- Changing the page help
- Working with portal navigation
- Using JSTL tags in the portal JSPs
- Model SPI overview
Models provide information needed by WebSphere Portal Express to perform tasks such as content aggregation or building navigation to browse the aggregated content. The information that is aggregated is represented through models that can be accessed programmatically using the Model SPI (read-only). The information of a model is usually persistent (stored in a data base) but can also be transient (computed and stored only in memory). Models can be represented using a tree structure (nodes have a parent-child relationship), a list structure, or a selection structure (a selected element in a tree structure).
- Controller SPI
You can use the Controller SPI for portal administration. It allows you to modify portal resources. It enhances the read-only portal Model SPI by adding writable aspects.
- Drag and drop zones
WebSphere Portal Express includes markup that allows users to drag portlets on a page. This topic describes the tags and APIs provided to enable the drag and drop features and how you can include them in your custom themes and skins.
- Navigational State SPI
Navigational state represents the view of the portal that is associated with a particular client. The client can request (query) different views by interacting with the web page, for example by navigating to a new page. This interaction does not change the state on the server but requests a new view from the server. It is therefore a “safe” operation in terms of HTTP 1.1 (See RFC 2616, Section 9.1.1). This allows the client to navigate back and forward through its recent views, bookmark views, and go back to them by invoking a browser bookmark. This behavior is achieved by encoding the navigational state of IBM WebSphere Portal Express into the URL. Different navigational states result in different URLs.
- User and group management
Parent topic: Designing a portal site
Related tasks
Preserving people awareness features in a customized portal
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