Getting started

A portal server consists of several portals, each portal consists of portal pages, and each page consists of portlets.

As seen in the following screenshot of the portal home page depicted in the following screenshot, the default portal we have just installed consists of four portal pages, Home, News, Weather, and Samples:

The default portal page called Home consists of four portlets, namely, Greetings, User Profile, Current Users (on the left side), and Content View (on the right). The Greetings, User Profile, and Current Users portlets have simple and obvious functions, and their window states can be changed by interacting with the decoration buttons in the upper-right section of each portlet window. The content view on the right has no decorations, and hence has a default static behavior.

We can continue to explore the default portal pages as an anonymous user, or we can log in to the portal and customize the content for ourselves. To log in, we can register ourselves using the User profile portlet on the default home page. For now, we will use the default user ID and password that come with the JBoss portal installation.

After we enter the credentials by clicking on the Login link on the upper-right of the page, we reach the home page that is now owned by user user. The home page is a standard page set by the administrator for all users, but the dashboard is a customized version created by the user.

Using an administrator account provides a lot more features in terms of the content management of portal home pages, account management, and access control. We will discuss these in detail in the subsequent chapters of this book. For now, we will continue with our understanding of the portal server by creating simple pages for a regular user account.

Creating our first portal page

A portal page is basically an aggregation of portlets, with decorated windows and content. Let's try and create a portal page using the JBoss portal platform.

After we logged in as user, we can begin to personalize and customize the portal by updating existing pages and creating new ones. The link on the upper-right of the screen, called Dashboard, takes us to a dashboard with content personalized to suit our needs. At this time, there is only a single page titled Home for the user user with limited functionality. Let us customize our dashboard by adding another page.

Clicking on the Configure Dashboard link will take us to the page that provides us with an interface that we can use to design our dashboard. The personal dashboard editor page is shown in the following screenshot:

We can use this page to either edit existing pages or to create new ones. Let us create a new page called First by entering the name in the upper-left section of the page, which is titled Create a New Page.

The page is now selected for editing by default, and we are ready to design the page and add content to it. We will leave the Theme and Layout sections with their default values, and focus instead on the Content Definition and Page Layout sections.

We will start by adding content of the type portlet, and picking the RSS portlet Yahoo finance from the following list. We will then add this portlet to the leftmost region of the new page called First. The screen should then appear as shown in the following screenshot:

Now, let's add another content of type widget — Google. Google widgets are small pieces of functionality that can be embedded in pages. We will use the first widget titled Useless Knowledge and add it to the center region of the page. Again, the page will now appear as follows:

We are now ready to check out the new page that we created to customize our dashboard. Clicking on the Dashboard link takes us back to the dashboard page, and we can now see the new page First, along with the Home page.

Clicking on the new tab First will show the following page:

Our first portal page is now ready! As you can see, the content displayed is the content that we selected earlier, and is laid out in exactly the way that we wanted. We can continue to play with the options in the dashboard configuration screens, including different content types and page styles, to get to a page that makes us most efficient and productive with respect to information and functionality.