The Portal Objects brings the administrator to a page showing the list of the available portal instances defined for this Portal server. Several points are of note. First, a navigation indicator or "breadcrumbs" is located right beneath the tabs. This provides context as to where in the hierarchy of portal objects the current screen is located as some of the screens can be found at several levels of the hierarchy. If you are lost, take a look at the breadcrumbs for context! When you first click on the Portal Objects tab, the context is the list of portals as shown in the picture above.

A link to access server-wide portal properties is located right beneath the breadcrumbs. This allows the administrator to set server-wide property and configure how errors should be handled:

Please refer to the Error handling chapter of the Reference Guide for more information on this point.

A form allowing administrator to create new portal instances is located beneath the Properties link. Enter the name of the new portal (which, of course, should be different from any of the already existing one) and click on Add portal and the portal instances list will be refreshed to display the newly created portal instance.

The last element of the top level of the Portal Objects tab is a table listing all the available portal instances along with possible actions on them. Clicking on the portal name will display a screen showing the information for this given portal instance, thus drilling down the hierarchy of available portal objects.

In the next sections we will demonstrate the functionality of the management portlet by drilling progressively further down this hiearchy to look at the default portal, one of its pages, show how to configure content on a page and finally, look at a specific window information.

If you click on the default portal in the list of available portal instances on the top-level Portal Objects page, you'll be taken to a page showing the information for the portal instance named "default", as shown below:

Note the breadcrumbs at the top of the screen indicating where in the hierachy you currently are. In this case, we are looking at the default portal.

Links to more information and operations that affect this portal instance are located beneath the breadcrumbs. We will look at them in turn later. We won't look at the Destroy operation, which as its name implies, allows an administrator to destroy the current portal instance (after a confirmation screen, as the operation is NOT undoable). Note that these links mirror the links that were available in the portal instances list on the top level page.

It is possible to create new pages using the page creation form located under the portal-wide operation links. Enter the new page name and click on Add and the new page will appear in the pages list, ready to be configured.

It is also possible to designate one of the portal page as the default page that users are directed to when they first access the portal instance. This is done by selecting the page via the page selection drop-down menu and then click on Update.

Finally, a table displaying the list of available pages for this portal instance is located at the bottom of this screen. The first column shows the page name, which you can click to drill down the hierachy and display the information specific to that particular page. The second column, on the other hand, provides a list of action links on the associated page. These links will be also appearing on individual page screens, as we shall see, just like portal action links appearing in the portal instances list also appeared on individual portal pages.

Let's now look at the default portal's Security information screen. This can be accessed by clicking the Security action link on the portal page. Here, an administrator can configure the default policy for security on objects for this portal instance:

Please refer to the Security chapter of the Reference Guide for more information about how to secure portal objects.

The Properties action link displays the currently configured properties for this portal instance and allows you to modify them, as well as configure the error handling strategy:

The Theme action link displays a screen where the administrator can configure theme, layout and render set for this portal instance:

Please refer to the Layouts and Themes chapter of the Reference Guide for more information about themes and layouts.

Now that we have looked at portal level information, let's drill down the hierachy again and look at a page, more precisely the default page, by clicking its name in the pages list.

The layout of this screen should start feeling familiar. The information for a page looks a lot like the information for a portal instance. Note the breadcrumbs indicating that you are indeed looking at a page. Again, we find the action links at the top of the page, mirroring the ones that were available for each page in the pages list of the portal instance screen. Once again, you can configure the page's security, theme and properties. You can also destroy it if so desired.

Similarly to other screens in the portal objects hierarchy, a page configuration screen also provides a list of all windows for that page. This list contains two columns: the first one contains the name of the window, while the second one provides a list of action links for that specific window. As usual, clicking on a window name will display information about that window.

Just like a portal instance can contain several pages, a page can contain several subpages. As such a page defines means to create subpages and set which subpage to display when a user is first directed to the page. These operations work similarly to the same operations at the portal instance level.

You can also rename the page if desired:

Of specific interest, though, is the Page Layout link. This is where you need to go to configure which portlet instance will be displayed in which window on which region on the page. Let's take a look at this screen and how it works:

This screen is structured in two parts, flowing from left to right, following the natural process involved in displaying content on a page. First, you need to identify which content you want to display: this is what the Content Definition section is for. Then, you need to figure out where on the page should this content be displayed, hence the Page Layout section.

Let's add a window named test displaying the content of the portlet instance named NewsPortletInstance to the center region, beneath the already existing CMSWindow. First, we need to enter our new window name in the Window name field and select the portlet content type from the drop down menu:

Once this is done, we can select the portlet instance by clicking its name in the instances list:

Note that this displays some information about the portlet instance. Finally, we can add our window to the center region of the page by clicking on Add button located left to the windows list for the region:

Note that we could move the window up or down in the region by selecting it in the list and using the button to the right of the list, or even destroy it if desired.

We can repeat this process to add content of different types. Let's add a window using a Google widget displaying the IP address of the user. First, give a name to your window (we'll use "google" here) and select widget/google from the content type drop-down menu:

Note how the instances list is replaced by a list of Google widgets. The widget we want to use is located in the Technology category, so select it from the category drop-down menu:

Press Search Gadgets and the widget list will be refreshed. The widget we want is MyIP:

You can now add the new window to the desired region.

Let's repeat this process again, this time with content from CMS. Enter a new window name (we'll use "cms" here) and select cms from the content type drop-down menu:

Once again, the instances list was replaced by a directory listing showing the available content roots. Click on default and select project.html:

You can now add the window to the desired region.

We've added three new windows to the default page using different content types. We added a window displaying the content of a portlet (displaying the content of an RSS feed in this case). Another one displaying a Google widget and yet another one some CMS-issued content. We decided to remove the existing CMSWindow, add the cms window below the test one in the center region, while the window showing the Google widget was added to the left region, below the existing content:

If all went well, logging out of the Admin portal, you should see (IP address blurred to protect the guilty ^_^):

You can read more about Content Integration in the Reference Guide. More details on how to setup content roots in CMS are available in Section 3.1, “Introduction”.

Window operations are similar to the same operations at other level of the hierachy of portal objects. The only information displayed when a window name is clicked in the windows list of a portal page information screen is information about the content, similar to the one that is displayed in the page layout screen. Thus, for the google window that we created in the previous section:

Note, once again, the breadcrumbs... :)