Look & Feel Architecture

WebLogic Portal's Look & Feel architecture provides flexible, powerful framework for determining the appearance of your portals. The following sections describe in general terms the different resources of a portal Look & Feel and the relationships among them.

The Look & Feel architecture involves the following resources:

Look & Feel Files, Skins, Skeletons, and Themes

A portal Look & Feel determines the physical appearance of a portal. It includes two main elements:

A portal Look & Feel stems from a single XML file (with a .laf extension). The .laf file determines the name of the Look & Feel and points to the skeleton and skin that the Look & Feel will use, as shown in the following illustration. This simple, extensible framework makes it easy for portal administrators and end users to completely change the appearance of a portal by selecting a different Look & Feel.

You can apply subsets of skins and skeletons to books, pages, and portlets. These subsets are called themes. Themes let you give individual books, pages, and portlets a different Look & Feel than the rest of the portal desktop. When you select a theme for a book, page, or portlet, the portal framework looks for theme subdirectories under the main skin and skeleton directories used by the selected Look & Feel.

For example, if a desktop Look & Feel uses the /framework/skeletons/default skeleton and you select a theme called "modern" for a portlet, the portal framework looks in the /framework/skeletons/default/modern directory for skeleton JSPs to render just that portlet. Other non-themed portlets are rendered with skeleton JSP files in the /framework/skeletons/default directory.

Layouts

Layouts define the placeholders (rows and columns) of a portal page in which portlets can be placed. Layouts also determine whether books and portlets are placed on top of each other (vertical) or beside each other (horizontal) in a placeholder.

A Layout is made up of two files: an XML file (with a .layout extension) and an HTML file (with a .html.txt extension), as shown in the following illustration.

The .layout file is the actual layout structure rendered. The .html.txt file is used to simulate the layout in the WebLogic Workshop Portal Extensions Portal Designer and in the WebLogic Administration Portal.

Layouts also have corresponding skeleton JSPs that render them. The desktop's selected Look & Feel determines which skeletons are used. The Creating Skeletons and Skeleton Themes topic contains a table that shows which skeleton JSPs are used.

Navigation Menus

Navigation Menus are used to navigate among books and pages in a portal. WebLogic Portal supplies the following default Navigation Menu styles:

A Navigation Menu is made up of an XML file (with a .menu extension), as shown in the following illustration. The menu file references a menu class that determines the menu's behavior, and the menu class references the skeleton JSP file that renders the menu.

Shells

A shell defines the area around the books and pages of a portal. When a portal is rendered, the shell creates the HTML opening and closing <html>, <head>, and <body> tags and creates the header and footer regions above and below a portal's books and pages.

In the header and footer elements of the shell, you can reference JSPs that display content in the header or footer.

A Shell is made up of an XML file (with a .shell extension), as shown in the following illustration.

Shells also have corresponding skeleton JSPs that render them. The Creating Skeletons and Skeleton Themes topic contains a table that shows which skeleton JSPs are used.

Samples

The Portal Samples contain portals that use a default set of Look & Feel resources. See the section in that topic on "Viewing the Samples" for instructions on opening the portals in WebLogic Workshop Platform Edition to see how the Look & Feel resources are used. Run the Tutorial Portal in a browser to view different Look & Feel implementations.

Also, when you add a Portal Web Project to an application in WebLogic Workshop Platform Edition, default Look & Feel resources are included with the project in the <project>\framework directory.

Related Topics

The Portal User Interface Framework

Creating Look & Feels

Portal Overview