# The Portal User Interface Framework

This section details how the portal framework turns a portal you develop in WebLogic Workshop into the portal desktop visitors see in a browser (see the figures at the bottom of this topic). The goal of describing the portal framework is to help you develop and troubleshoot your portals. These topics should enable you to look at a rendered portal in a browser and understand which pieces of the underlying framework you need to modify to get the results you want.

## Topics Included in This Section

The following topics describe key portal framework components and walk you through the portal rendering process:

How Look & Feel Determines Rendering

Describes how look & feel determines how a portal desktop is rendered and what it looks like.

How the Shell Determines Header and Footer Content

Describes how shells determine the content of a desktop header and footer.

How Portal Components Are Rendered

Illustrates the rendering process, showing how a portal component is converted to HTML.

Portal User Interface Framework Reference

Shows some of the main cascading style sheet classes and the skeleton JSPs that affect portal rendering.

The topics in this section show you the underlying processing that converts an XML-based .portal file created in WebLogic Workshop (below)...

...to fully rendered HTML (below).