A portal represents a web site that provides a single point of access to applications and information. From an end user perspective, a portal is a web site with pages that are organized by tabs or some other form of navigation. Each page contains a nesting of sub-pages, or one or more portlets—individual windows that display anything from static HTML content to complex web services. A page can contain multiple portlets, giving users access to different information and tools in a single place. Users can also customize their view of a portal by adding their own pages, adding portlets of their choosing, and changing the Look And Feel of the interface. Technically speaking, a portal is a container of resources and functionality that can be made available to end users. These portal views, which are called desktops in WebLogic Portal, provide the uniform resource location (URL) that users access. A portal presents diverse content and applications to users through a consistent, unified web-based interface. Portal administrators and users can customize portals, and content can be presented based on user preferences or rule-based personalization. Each portal is associated with a web application that contains all of the resources required to run portals on the web.
WebLogic Portal supports development of portals through Workshop for WebLogic, which is a client-based tool. You can also develop portals without Workshop for WebLogic through coding in any tool of choice such as JBuilder, vi or Emacs. Portals can be written in Java or JSP, and can include JavaScript for client-side operations. Although you can create portals outside of Workshop for WebLogic, to realize the full development-time productivity gains afforded to the WebLogic Portal customer, use Workshop for WebLogic as the portal and portlet development platform.
The portal framework is the portion of WebLogic Portal that is responsible for the rendering and customization of the portal. The portal framework turns a portal that you develop in Workshop for WebLogic into the HTML page that desktop visitors see in a browser. When you are familiar with the portal framework tools provided in WebLogic Portal, you can look at a rendered portal in a browser and understand which pieces of the underlying framework you need to modify to obtain the results you want.
What are the advantages of content management? A CMS provides many advantages over traditional methods, particularly when distributed teams of users are responsible for coordinating and contributing to different content repositories. Empower Content