Before you begin, you must complete Exercise 1.5: Add portlets that search Auction site listings and provide listing details.
In this exercise, you will create a new portal application with pages that will contain the portlets that have been created up to this point.
To create the Auction portal project, follow these steps:
There are two types of default skin. One is for the overall portal site, and the other is for a theme. In this wizard, you are specifying only the default skin for the selected default theme. (Only one skin can be a default skin for a portal site.) Typically, each theme has a default skin defined, and the default skin for a portal site is rarely used.
Portal Designer displays the project's Portal Configuration file, which shows the default navigation structure with one label and a child page:
Portal Designer provides specialized editors for working with a number of familiar portal elements, including labels, pages, a navigation, and themes and skins, which, along with cascading style sheets, allow you to control the look and feel of a portal site.
Use Portal Designer to create the portal layout elements for the portlets that you have created:
The portal pages provide a framework for adding content to your portal site. You have already created this content in the form of the portlets defined in previous exercises. In order to add multiple portlets to individual pages, you can define a spatial layout with some combination of rows and columns that allow you to place portlets on the page in a logical fashion.
By default, each page that you create includes a single column and a single row. It is a simple process to add columns and rows as you would for any "table" in a Web application. (Note that the table metaphor is not part of the standard portal terminology--it is only being used for instructional purposes.) Because you will be adding two portlets to the listing page, you can add another "cell" to the Listing page layout, in this case a column. You can do this in one of two ways:
In either case, the additional column is created, so that the ListingDetail portlet can be inserted later. The Portal Configuration displays the empty column:
Now that there are new pages with layout elements under the Auction label, you can add the portlets that were created in earlier exercises in the following way:
Note that you can also perform the same action using the Outline view. In the Outline view, expand the Layout node, and then the Registration node. Under the Column, you will see the UserAdmin portlet icon. Select the column and right-click to open the pop-up menu. Observe that there are cascading menus to add additional portlets to the page.
The updated Listing page should look similar to this:
The portal site is nearly completed. In the exercise that follows, you will learn how to customize the look and feel of the portal site using some of the specialized editors that work in conjunction with Portal Designer.
Now you are ready to begin Exercise 2.2: Customizing the portal site.