Task 2: Building A Portal

This tutorial task introduces portals and desktops, and demonstrates how to use the WebLogic Administration Portal to build them.

A portal provides a way to aggregate content and integrate applications, allowing a visitor to a Web site to access everything via a single user interface. Portals are composed of a collection of portlets, each of which typically presents an application. Portlets are arranged on pages, which in turn are part of a book. These components are on the main body of the portal, which can also include a header and footer as part of the shell. The way that the portal is displayed and how it behaves is determined by the look and feel. It is this collection of components that makes up a portal.

A desktop is a specific view of a portal, allowing for variations based on the characteristics of a visitor to a site. For example, an employee and a customer might both visit a particular portal, but each will be directed to the appropriate desktop. Each desktop can have a distinct look and feel, organization of books and pages, and set of available portlets. Further control over the available resources is accomplished with Visitor Entitlements. For more information, see Task 3: Setting Entitlements for Portal Resources.

In this task you will create a basic portal and two desktops, which will be used in the later tasks. This task takes about 20 minutes to complete.

Task Goals

The goal of this task is to learn how to create a basic portal, two desktops, and add a number of portal resources. These desktops will be used in later tasks for setting entitlements and delivering personalized content.

Task Overview

In this task, you will create a portal, two desktops, add portal resources to one of the desktops, and view it.

Steps in This Task

Step 1: Start the WebLogic Administration Portal

> In this step you open the WebLogic Administration Portal, if it is not already open.

Step 2: Create a Basic Portal

> In this step you create a new portal called MyPortal.

Step 3: Create Two Desktops for MyPortal

> In this step you create two desktops for MyPortal -- Desktop1 using a template and Desktop2 using existing portal resources.

Step 4: Add Portal Resources to a Desktop

> In this step you add a new page to Desktop2, then add two portlets to the new page.