Overview of Portal Resources

This table provides descriptions of all of the portal resources/templates that are available to you in the WebLogic Administration Portal Library. These resources are initially created by developers and made available to the administration portal.

Portal Librarians can use these resources to create additional resources to populate the Portal Library. Portal administrators can create instances of these resources to assemble customized portals.

Portal Resource | Description
Portal | A portal is a Web application that provides a unified user interface to aggregated content and integrated applications. When you "create a Portal" using the tools in the WebLogic Administration Portal, you are essentially creating a "holder" for Desktops, or customized views of the portal. To the Desktops you add other portal resources such as books, portlets, and look and feels. You can then entitle these desktops and resources for specific users.
Desktop | Desktops are the application views of a portal that are accessed by visitors to a site. A desktop is contained within a portal, and there may be multiple desktops within each portal. A desktop contains all the portlets, content, and look and feel elements necessary to create individual user views of a portal. All users access the default before they define their own desktops.
Books | A book is a collection of pages. In a portal the book is often represented as a tabbed set of pages in which only one page is visible at a time. Selecting a different tab in the set causes the corresponding page to be displayed.
Pages | A Page is the primary holder of individual portal elements such as portlets. Pages are added to Books. The pages contained within a book can themselves contain portlets and books, with the latter allowing for an infinite level of nesting. This provides a hierarchical organization that is very flexible, although there is a practical limit to the nesting based on the available screen real-estate and taste.
Portlets | Portlets are the visible components that act as the interface to applications. They are similar to the windows found in most GUIs in their basic look, but they are contained within a portal page and therefore restricted in terms of layout and behavior.
Portlet Categories | Portlet categories are named groupings of portlets created by administrators. Portlet categories cannot be entitled as a unit.
Layouts | A layout determines the arrangement of portlets and book within a matrix, with one layout for each page. Each cell of this matrix contains a Placeholder, which may in turn contain one or more portlets or books arranged vertically or horizontally.
Look and Feels | Look and Feels are collections of skins and skeletons used to determine the way that a portal is rendered and the way that it behaves. The look and feel of a portal is independent of the organizational and navigational structure of a portal.
Shells | The top-level container for a portal desktop that provides the sections that comprise the portal, typically a header, footer, and body. A shell may be specified independently of the look and feel or main book.