Use Portal Designer to change the appearance of your portal.
Upon opening your portal project, you will see the Portal Designer editor in the center of the workbench. The following views surround it: Project Explorer, Outline and Thumbnails, Properties, and Palette.
In terms of portal layout and appearance, you can think of Portal Designer as a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editor. It will render graphic interface items such as themes, skins, and page layouts.
Portal Designer will also render the initial pages of JSF and Struts portlets within your portal pages, but not anything else with regard to portlet content. You can view your portal site, with portlet content, using the WebSphere® Portal test environment.
Description | View |
Use this editor to customize both the graphic design
of your portal and the layout of your portal pages. Use it as you would use
any WYSIWYG web editor. Functions you can perform include:
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Description | View |
Project Explorer When you open your portal project, the Project Explorer opens by default in the upper left-hand corner of your screen. Use this view to navigate the file structure of your portal. The folders for both portal (and portlet) projects appear in the root of the Dynamic Web Projects folder. When you expand a portal project folder, the Portal Configuration appears as a node in the project root. If a portal project has portlets associated with it, the portlets will appear as children of the Portal Configuration node. Each project's EAR folders appear in the Enterprise Applications folder. |
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Description | View |
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The Thumbnails view works in conjunction with both the Theme and Skin nodes that appear within your portal project folder. For more information, refer to the Project Explorer views section on this page.
You can drag and drop a theme thumbnail onto a Label or a Page (See Changing themes), or you can drag and drop a skin thumbnail onto a portlet. (See Changing skins).
The Properties view appears at the bottom of the screen under the Portal Designer editor. Depending on which design element you choose, either within the Outline view or the Portal Designer editor, the properties view will change to reflect the options that you can edit for that element.
The following image shows an example of the Properties
view for a WebSphere Portal
v5.1 page:
When designing the layout of your portal page, you can insert one of these items by dragging it to the Portal Designer editor. |
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