Defining layouts

Portal Designer allows you to alter the layout of your content within a portal page.

In terms of your portal, layout refers to two different design aspects:

Navigation relies on the parent-child relationships that you establish among all of your portal's labels, pages, and URLs. When a portal project is compatible with WebSphere® Portal v5.1, the navigation root node in the Outline view is labeled Content Root. For projects compatible with WebSphere Portal v5.0, the node labeled My Portal is the navigation root node.

In this example of a project compatible with WebSphere Portal v5.1, we expanded the navigation root node to see the hierarchy of labels, pages, and URLs throughout a portal project.

Navigation root node in WP v5.1 Project

Portal pages are structured by the rows, columns, and portlets it contains. In this example, we expanded the Layout node to show how to view the hierarchy of each page in a portal project

Layout Node in Outline view

A page's active state determines its visibility in Portal Designer. By default, a page is active when it is added to the Portal Configuration. To work with pages, do the following:

  1. In the Outline view, expand the Layout node. A list of pages will appear in the root of this node.
  2. To view the layout hierarchy of a page, expand the page's node. As you expand each node, elements such as rows, columns, and portlets will appear.
    Note: In a WebSphere Portal v5.0.2.x project, you can cut-and-paste or drag-and-drop labels, pages, or URLs to different levels of navigation tree only within nodes that have the same parent.
  3. To surface one of these elements in the Portal Configuration, click on the element. The element you select will appear in with a black outline around it in the Portal Configuration. The editable attributes for this element will also surface in the Properties view.

For more information on working within the Outline view, refer to Using the Outline view.

For more information about editing properties, refer to the Properties view section of Using Portal Designer.

Related tasks
Using Portal Designer
Editing styles
Working with skins
Working with themes
Adding portlets to portal pages

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