This document describes building your own custom portal enviroment from scratch.
Compared to the Getting started track
the following items
are newly explained:
- Setting up a custom site map navigational structure in Hippo Repository.
- Writing your own portlet.
- Creating your own portal pages and layouts.
- Configuration
Before building and deploying your own portal, several component applications have to be in place: the Hippo Repository, Hippo CMS, your webserver and a database. See component applications for details on how to install these.
Furthermore, to build the portal, you will need JDK 1.5 or more, Maven-1 build tool and the Hippo Portal Maven-1 plugin, see the build requirements for details.
Two separate projects are needed, to be built with Maven build tool. The first is a portal project, based on Hippo Portal. For details, see the portal project . The second is a portlet application project, also based on Hippo Portal components. For details, see the portal project .
The site map is an important document that is present in the repository. It serves primarily as a mapping between (a part of) an url and a portal page. Secondarily a mapping may be present to a node in the repository, with which portlets can retrieve their content.
To set up the site map in a repository, see here .
Now it is time for some Java coding. There are various approaches to use or write your portlets, where Hippo's standard components can make things easy for you.
For more information on how to write and configure your portlet, see writing portlets .
To show the portlets in the portal, portal pages are to be created, which are XML documents of type PSML, i.e. Portal Structure Markup Language. A portal page defines fragments, which are the window parts of a page where content is placed. A fragment may reference either an actual portlet, showing it's content, or a layout, implementing the placements of child fragments. These child fragments may of course be portlets or (nested) layouts.
For details, see portal pages .
Now that portlets are placed in a certain layout on a portal page, a look and feel can be assigned to both portlets and layouts by means of decorators.
For details, see decorators .
The portal and portlet application has to be configured before building it. This configuration concerns for instance namespacing, database data, location paths like that of the webserver, or Spring configuration. For details, see configuration .
The portal with its portlet application(s) are to be built and deployed on a webserver, normally Tomcat. For both, the Hippo Portal Maven-1 plugin can be used. For details, see building and deploying .