Step 2: Change the Portal Look & Feel and Navigation

In this step, you will change a portal's look and feel, change the navigation scheme for the portal pages, and view the results.

The tasks in this step are:

Open the Sample Portal

The Sample portal is included with the WebLogic Workshop Portal Extensions. It contains a set of pre-built sample portlets you can reuse in your own portals. You will change the Sample portal's look and feel and page navigation scheme.

  1. In the Application window, expand the sampleportal folder.
  2. Double-click sample.portal. The portal file opens in the Portal Designer.

View the Portal in a Browser

In this step, view the existing look and feel and navigation of the Sample portal to see what it looks like before you change it.

  1. In the WebLogic Workshop toolbar, click the Start button (or press Ctrl+F5) to view the portal in the Workshop Test Browser.

    Click the page navigation tabs and note the behavior.
  2. Close the WebLogic Test Browser.

Add a Book to the Main Page Book

  1. In the Palette window, drag the Book control into the Main Page Book area of the Portal Designer, next to My Page. A new book appears in the main page book.

    Do NOT drag the Book control into a placeholder on one of the pages.
  2. Click the New Book tab. Notice that it automatically contains a new page as well.

Change the Portal's Look and Feel

  1. In the Document Structure window, click Desktop.
  2. In the Property Editor window, change the Look and Feel property from avitek to Classic.

Change the Portal's Navigation

  1. In the Document Structure window, click Book: Main Page Book.
  2. In the Property Editor window, change the Navigation property from Single Level Menu to Multi Level Menu. Multi-level menus display links to nested books and pages with drop-down navigation.
  3. Save the portal file.

View the Modified Portal in a Browser

You can view the portal with the WebLogic Test Browser or with your default browser.

Use the page and book navigation links and note the different navigation behavior. The New Book link should provide a drop-down navigation menu to access the page it contains.

Congratulations! You have changed a portals look and feel and page navigation style.

Related Topics

Changing a Page Layout

Creating Look and Feels

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