# Getting Started: Portal Core Concepts

This topic will familiarize you with the basic concepts of Portal design and development.

## What is a Portal?

A Portal is a web application that presents and organizes disparate web content in a personalizable manner.

A Portal can present a wide variety of different web content from static HTML files to complex web applications, all of them organized into a single web site. A good example Portal is the Sample Portal, which contains portlets for logging in, news feeds, collaboration, and content management.

Personalizing the Portal might be as a simple as allowing users to choose a color scheme or as complex as presenting different Portal content depending on whether the user is a customer, employee, or manager.

## Designing Portals with WebLogic Workshop

Portals are designed using WebLogic Workshop, a visual tool for designing Java and web applications. The image below shows a Portal being designed within WebLogic Workshop. WebLogic Workshop allows you to design a Portal by dragging and dropping components and setting properties on those components.

The Application tab (area 1) shows the Portal's source files. A Portal is stored as a .portal file, an XML file with the .portal extention. When a browser is pointed at a .portal file, the Portal is rendered as HTML.

The main work area (area 2) contains a picture of your Portal. You add content to the Portal by dropping and dragging elements into the main work area.

The Property Editor (area 3) allows you to set properties on Portal elements. When you select a Portal element in the main work area, its associated properties appear in the Property Editor.

## Organizing Content

When you have lots of different kinds of content, you need some way to organize it into a coherent whole. Portals let you organize your content using common visual and navigational tools devices such as tabs, menus and windows. The following list describes the basic devices used to organize web content within a Portal. Consult the image above to see how these organizational tools are rendered in the Workshop design environment.

A book (area 4) is a high-level organizational container for web content. By default a book is rendered in a web browser as a series of tabs, but you may choose to render them as a list of links, or in some other way. A book can contain other books or pages. A Portal can contain as many books as you like, but each Portal has one main book, which is the top-level container for all the content in the Portal.

A page (area 5) is a low-level organizational container for web content. By default a page is rendered as a single tab in a web browser. A page is typically divided into different columns and windows. These windows contain the actual web content of the Portal.

Web content is surfaced through Portlets (area 6). Portlets are embedded windows in your Portal that behave much like application windows: they are maximizable, minimizable, and closable. A Portlet can contain something simple, like a static HTML page, or something complex, like a feature rich web application.

## Personalization Features

The following list describes some of the ways that you can personalize the content of a Portal

Desktops

A desktop is a user-specific view of the Portal content. A single Portal can support many different desktops, each designed with a specific kind of user in mind. A customer-specific desktop might show that content that appeals especially to customers, such as a product catalog, a shopping cart, and a wish-list. An employee-specific desktop might show a broader view of the Portal content, such as an inventory tracking application, an employee directory, or other sensitive information that should not be exposed to the general public.

User Controls

You can personalize the behavior of an individual application within the Portal by using a user control. A user control allows you to store and retrieve information about an individual user. The information might include the last date the user visited the Portal, the user's preferences, or a user profile.

Campaigns

Campaigns allow you to expose users to web content based on specfic rules. The content might be advertising in the form of a pop-up window, email, or a web banner. The rules you use might be based on the user's demographic profile, purchasing history, or navigational patterns inside the Portal.

## Administration of Portals

Portals are web applications that are constantly evolving. After a Portal has been designed and put into production on the web, often a new need arises for different content, or old content becomes outdated. For these reasons, there needs to be a way to change the Portal without an extensive re-design process.

This is where the Portal Administrator steps in. The Portal Administrator Console lets you perform common administration and design tasks at runtime without having to put the Portal through another design process. For example, a Portal Administrator can add new desktops, pages, and portlets, or change the behavior of a campaign.

Portal Administrators also manage the Portal's users. They can create or delete user accounts, or they can edit the user's entitlements within the Portal.

### Related Topics

Portal Overview

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