The following topics introduce the new and changed features of WebCenter Portal and other significant changes that are described in this guide, and provides pointers to additional information. This book is the new edition of the formerly titled Developer's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Portal.
WebCenter Portal 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.8.0) includes the following new and changed features:
Terminology changes:
| Prior Releases | 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.8.0) |
|---|---|
| WebCenter Portal: Spaces | WebCenter Portal |
| space | portal |
Updated profile user interface that includes improved organization of profile information, click to edit, and clear profile photo functionality. See the "Managing Your Profile" chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Using Oracle WebCenter Portal. Additional documentation for the rich user profile is referenced under Portal Builder, Administration, and Development Environment.
Improved search experience (supported with Oracle SES 11.2.2.2) that includes faceted search and document thumbnails. See the "Searching for Information" chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Using Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Simplified portal creation that includes in-place page creation. See the "Creating and Building a New Portal" chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Redesigned portal edit and administration user interface (Portal Builder.) that consolidates tasks into fewer steps See the "Editing a Portal" and "Administering a Portal" chapters in Oracle Fusion Middleware Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Simplified page creation and editing: Web (for editing) and Data (for managing) views, inline resource catalog (with support for component drag-and-drop onto a page), and Select view. See the "Working with Portal Pages" chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Automatic update of portal navigation as new pages are created. See the "Creating a Page or Subpage in an Existing Portal" section in Oracle Fusion Middleware Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal.
"Lazy provisioning" of tools—WebCenter Portal configures the back-end server at first use of a tool rather than at portal creation to speed the successful creation of a new portal. See the "About Creating a New Portal" section in Oracle Fusion Middleware Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Hierarchical page support (subpages). See the "Creating Pages or Subpages in a Portal" section in Oracle Fusion Middleware Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Updated profile user interface that includes improved organization of profile information, click to edit, and clear profile photo functionality; new component properties for improved control of people connections and activity graph components. See the "Adding Activity Graphs and Recommendations to a Portal," "Adding Connections to a Portal," and "Adding Profiles to aPortal" chapters in Oracle Fusion Middleware Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal. Additional documentation for the rich user profile is referenced under End-User Experience, Administration, and Development Environment.
Device Settings that control how your portal pages render on different devices, such smart phones, tablets, and desktop browsers. Page variants can be created to target and optimally render a portal on specific groups of devices like iOS phones, iOS tablets, and others. See the "Administering Device Settings in a Portal" section, the "Managing Device Groups for a Portal" chapter, and the "Creating a Page Variant for a Device Group" section in Oracle Fusion Middleware Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal. Additional documentation for mobile support is referenced under Administration and Development Environment.
Responsive Content Presenter templates that provide an example of how you can use Content Presenter and CSS3 media queries to produce a responsive layout that adjusts to the width of the browser (for example, on smart phones, tablets, and desktop browsers). See the "Using Responsive Templates" section in Oracle Fusion Middleware Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal. Additional documentation for mobile support is referenced under Development Environment.
Updated profile user interface that includes improved organization of profile information, click to edit, and clear profile photo functionality; new component properties for improved control of people connections and activity graph components. See Chapter 37, "Introducing the People Connections Service," Chapter 39, "People Connections Task Flow Binding Parameters," and Chapter 46, "Integrating the Activity Graph." Additional documentation for the rich user profile is referenced under End-User Experience, Portal Builder, and Administration.
Developers can use Expression Language (EL) to retrieve information about Device Settings. Device Settings control how your portal pages render on different devices including smart phones, tablets, and desktop browsers. See Section F.15, "EL Expressions Related to Device Settings." Additional documentation for mobile support is referenced under Portal Builder and Administration.
Responsive Content Presenter templates that provide an example of how you can use Content Presenter and CSS3 media queries to produce a responsive layout that adjusts to the width of the browser (for example, on phones, tablets, or personal computers). See Section 27.3.4, "Using Responsive Templates" and Section 27.3.5, "Extending Responsive Templates." Additional documentation for mobile support is referenced under Portal Builder.
Simplified custom shared library development and deployment. WebCenter Portal provides a new JDeveloper template that enables you to build custom components, such as task flows, data controls, and managed beans and deploy them in shared libraries directly to the WebCenter Portal server. See Chapter 55, "Developing Components for WebCenter Portal Using JDeveloper."
Simplified WebCenter Portal administration that includes a power user oriented experience with familiar concepts for legacy WebCenter Portal customers. See the "Managing Portals in Portal Builder Administration" part in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal.
New profile configuration settings that include properties to specify whether to show the new or legacy profile user interface and to specify profile synchronization settings. See the "Managing People Connections" chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal. Additional documentation for the rich user profile is referenced under End-User Experience, Portal Builder, and Development Environment.
Device Settings that control how your portal pages render on different devices, such as smart phones, tablets, and desktop browsers. Page variants can be created to target and optimally render a portal on specific groups of devices like iOS phones, iOS tablets, and others. See the "Deploying Devices and Device Groups" section, the "Creating a Page Variant of a System Page for Device Groups" section, and the "Administering Device Settings" chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal. Additional documentation for mobile support is referenced under Portal Builder and Development Environment.
Impersonation, which allows a privileged user to impersonate another user for the purposes of verifying the other user's experience in WebCenter Portal and troubleshooting unexpected results. See the "Managing Impersonation" chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Improved portal lifecycle tools that enable export/import and backup/recovery of one or more portals with minimal downtime. See the "Deploying Portals, Templates, Assets, and Extensions" and "Managing WebCenter Portal Backup, Recovery, and Cloning" chapters in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Integrated Oracle WebCenter Portal's Pagelet Producer user interface within WebCenter Portal's administrative user interface to make system administrators aware of the existence of Pagelet Producer pagelets and to allow them to make these pagelets available to end users. Integrating the UIs also provides Pagelet Producer developers to easily navigate from WebCenter Portal where they see the pagelets to the Pagelet Producer Admin UI so they can create new or edit existing pagelets. See the "Managing the Pagelet Producer" chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal.
New page performance analyzer that shows you how long individual components take to display on a portal page, as well as the overall time taken to display a page. This new tool is useful to developers who are performing first level performance analysis, customers who build their own pages, and any user who customizes pages in WebCenter Portal. See the "How to Identify Slow Page Components" section in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Restructured documentation library according to personas and their roles in WebCenter Portal:
Oracle Fusion Middleware Developing Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle JDeveloper (this guide) covers information needed by a developer who primarily works with JDeveloper to provide support for both portals and WebCenter Portal Framework applications.
Oracle Fusion Middleware Using Oracle WebCenter Portal covers information needed by a knowledge worker who typically uses WebCenter Portal to contribute and review content, participate in social interactions, and leverage the Home portal to manage her own documents and profile.
Oracle Fusion Middleware Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal covers information needed by an application specialist who works in Portal Builder to create and administer portals, their structure (hierarchy of pages, navigation, security), and their content (components on a page, layout, behavior, and so on).
Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal covers information needed by a system administrator who fields requests from IT employees and business users to set up new machines; clone or back up existing applications systems and databases; install patches, packages, and applications; and perform other administration-related tasks.
For more information, see "Who's Who."