Displays hard-coded links to downloading JBoss Portal, downloading portlets from PortletSwap, and the live online JBoss Portal demo. It also contains default authentication information on loging in, as well as a link to the official Portal documentation.

Once successfully logged in, the user will have additional functionality at his disposal, that is covered in the following sections.

The User Portlet allows a user to:

Portal includes a basic Content Management System (CMS). Portal provides a CMS portlet which allows users to navigate the CMS content (static html, images, binary files, etc.).

Displaying content is done by the portal using a path mapper. For example, if we wanted to display a zip file, located in /default/foo/bar.zip, we would type in the URL http://localhost:8080/content/default/foo/bar.zip. Notice how the path to the content, is prefixed with the '/content' term. Although in this example we are describing binary content retrieval, the same is to be said for text/html files. Keep in mind, however, that binary files are displayed outside of the portal pages, but text/html are displayed inside the CMSPortlet Window.

Serving Logic: The CMS Portlet now serves content based on the user's locale setting. For example: if a user's locale is set to Spanish in his browser, and he requests URL: default/index.html , the CMSPortlet will first try and retrieve the Spanish version of that file. If a Spanish version is not found, it will then try and retrieve the default language version set for the CMSPortlet (set to English, by default).

The News Portlet retrieves an RSS news feed from a URL and displays it as HTML to the user.

Additionally, a logged-in user is able to modify her preference in RSS feed source by using the Portlet's Edit Mode (click ). Once the form is submitted, this property will be saved in the user's preference, so she will always see the same news source, when logged in.

The Weather Portlet retrieves an RSS weather feed, based on a key (commonly a US Postal Code), and displays it as HTML to the user.

Additionally, a logged-in user is able to modify her preference in location by using the Portlet's Edit Mode (click ). Any valid US Postal Code can be input here. Once the form is submitted, this property will be saved in the user's preference, so she will always see the same weather data for her location, when logged in.

Not in the United States? Follow these steps to configure the Weather portlet to display information for your area.

You can select a theme and layout for your dashboard by selecting from the available ones and then clicking on select in the Theme and Layout form.

You can also create new pages that will be added to your dashboard by simply entering the name of the new page in the Create New Page form at the top left of the screen.

Upon creating a new page, the screen will refresh and allow a user to customize the new page.

You may delete dashboard pages at any time, by first selecting the page you want to delete using the popup menu at the top of the screen and then clicking the Delete this page button at the bottom of the screen. We will note that users are not able to delete the default dashboard page.

You can add, remove and reorder portlets on a dashboard page to adapt your environment to your liking. To do so, just select the page you want to modify using the page popup selector and use the portlet management form. We will not explain how to use it here as it is similar to the page layout functionality of the Admin portal, which we will look at in Section 2.2.1.3, “Looking at a page configuration”