Manage portlets on a page

The Portlet Palette provides you with a collection of portlets that you can drag to the page for quick and easy page customization.

You can organize and group the portlets available to you for deployment from your collection through the use of categories. Categories provide you with a way to organize your portlets using your own classification scheme.

You can create new categories for grouping and organizing portlets in your collection, and you can rename categories as appropriate. You can customize the Portlet Palette further by rearranging categories, adding portlets to categories, and by moving portlets from one category to another. You can also search by title for portlets of interest. You can apply these customizations to your individual instance of the Portlet Palette or change the settings to affect all or selected instances of the Portlet Palette as needed.

The Portlet Palette is designed to work in the fly-out palette. Adding the Portlet Palette to a page could result in undesired results. When working with the Portlet Palette, keep the following tips in mind:

• You should be logged in to the portal site using an ID with sufficient access rights to modify a page. Access control for customizing and working with the Portlet Palette is based on portlet roles, portlet modes, and page permissions. The portlets available to you are also filtered by any restricted portlet lists that exist for a page.

• The drag-and-drop feature is present for default portal themes in rows and containers that are not locked.

• Entries in the Portlet Palette could become obsolete. For example, when an administrator deletes a portlet from the portal while a user is creating or editing pages, the user may not be aware of these updates. A user must log out and log back in to the portal to view the changes made by the administrator. If a user attempts to drag a portlet from the Portlet Palette when the portlet no longer exists, a message is recorded to the portal logs.

  Although this is a rare situation, administrators should not remove and add portlets during normal business hours.

• The Portlet Palette does not support the use of double quotes in category names.

To begin customizing the Portlet Palette and adding portlets to the page, click the expand arrow icon to open the Portlet Palette.

• Add portlets to a page

  The Portlet Palette provides you with a quick and easy way to deploy portlets to the page. You can drag a single portlet or multiple portlets within the same category to the page. Categories provide you with a way to organize portlets in the Portlet Palette. IBM recommends that you only add portlets to the page using the drag-and-drop feature from the Portlet Palette.

• Accessible alternative for adding a portlet to a page

  A mouse is required to use the drag-and-drop feature of the portal. Alternatively, you can use your keyboard to add portlets to a page as an accessible alternative to dragging portlets from the Portlet Palette to the page.

• Rearrange portlets on a page

  You can change the placement of individual portlets on a page using the drag-and-drop feature of the portal. The drag-and-drop feature is present for all themes and for row and column containers that are not locked. You should be logged into the portal site using an ID with sufficient access rights to modify a page.

• Accessible alternatives for rearranging portlets on a page

  A mouse is required to use the drag-and-drop feature of the portal. Alternatively, you can use your keyboard to rearrange portlets on a page as an accessible alternative to dragging portlets to a new destination on the page.

• Restrict the movability of portlets on a page

  You can define widths for containers. You can use this feature to restrict the possibility for users to move portlets on a page. The portal provides this functionality by a portlet placement filter or width filter.

  This width filter compares width of a portlet to the width of a column container.

  If the width of the portlet is larger than that of the container, the portlet cannot be moved to this container.

• Creating a category

  Categories provide you with a way to organize your portlets using your own classification scheme. You can create new categories for grouping and organizing portlets in your collection.

• Search for portlets

  You can search for a portlet in the Portlet Palette by entering part or all of the portlet title in the Search field. The search is not case-sensitive, and only portlets where you have the correct permissions are displayed in your search results.

• Limiting search results

  The number of search results is limited by a configuration parameter which can be changed by the administrator. The default value limits the search results to 100.

• Rearrange categories in the Portlet Palette

  You can rearrange a category by dragging the category to a new destination in the Portlet Palette.

• Move portlets to another category

  You can drag a copy of a portlet from one category to another category to customize the Portlet Palette. A portlet is not removed from the original category when you move this portlet to another category. When you drag a portlet to another category, you can only move this portlet to one category at a time.

  You can also add a copy of a portlet to multiple categories at one time by accessing the drop-down menu by the portlet name in the category.

• Copy a portlet to multiple categories

  You can add a copy of a portlet in a category to multiple categories at one time if you have the proper access level. If you only need to add a copy of a portlet to a single category, you can simply drag a copy of the portlet to the appropriate category. A portlet is not removed from the original category when you add a copy of this portlet to multiple categories.

• Rename a category in a palette

  Default categories are provided to you in the Portlet Palette. Depending on your access level, you can customize your Portlet Palette by renaming these categories and categories you later create to provide the best organizational scheme for portlets in your Portlet Palette.

• Set the category titles for other languages

  When you rename a category in the Portlet Palette, you have the option to edit the category names for other languages.

• Resetting the Palette to the default settings

  You can return the Portlet Palette to the default settings currently maintained by your administrator. Resetting the Portlet Palette to use the current administrator settings removes any customizations you have made.

• Deleting a category

  You can delete a category in the Portlet Palette as needed if you have the proper access level.

• Deleting a portlet from a Palette category

  You can delete a portlet from a category in the Portlet Palette as needed.

• Modifying Palette settings

  You can change the settings to affect all instances of the Portlet Palette on every page or selected instances of the Portlet Palette by selecting a different portlet mode. When you initially open the Portlet Palette, you are either in the View or Personalize mode depending on your access level.

• Access control for the Palette

  Access control for customizing and working with the Portlet Palette is based on portlet roles, portlet modes, and page permissions. By default, users are assigned to the All Authenticated Portal Users role which only provides read access to the Portlet Palette. Users will only see portlets on the Portlet Palette that they have user access to view.

Parent topic:

Administer WebSphere Portal

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