This recipe will show you how to create and manage portal instances in GateIn using the built-in administration console. We are going to create a new portal instance for a financials site that can offer profiled services for clients.
- Locate your browser at the default homepage of the portal.
- Click on Sign in and authenticate with an administrator account, for instance using the
rootuser:- Username:
root - Password:
gtn
- Username:
- After clicking on the Sign in button, you should see the administration toolbar on the top of the page with the following menu:
- GateIn icon
- Site
- Group
- Dashboard
- Site Editor
We want to create a new private portal instance to offer financial services to clients of a potential company. During the first phase of the development of the portal, we only want administrators to be able to access the portal.
- Click on Site | Add New Portal and insert the values shown in the following screenshot:
- Click on Permission Setting to change the current options tab to where you can add and change permissions. Click on the Add Permission button and then click on Platform | Administrators.
- Select manager from the Membership panel and click on Edit Permission Setting.
- Click on the Select Permission button, and then click on Platform | Administrators.
- Select manager from the Membership panel on the right and finally click on the Save button and you should see output similar to the following screenshot:
- Check the new portal instance by visiting the following URL:
http://localhost:8080/portal/financials - The portal now shows you a login form that you couldn't see earlier. Try to gain access using the administrator role and you should see the homepage of the financials portal.
The primary goal of this recipe was to show you how to create a new private portal instance.
By now, you will understand how to use the Site menu to create new portal instances simply by using the default options provided by the GUI.
We have created a new portal instance that can be accessed and edited only by administrators. This was just our starting approach, but notice that in the Permission Setting tab, you can adjust the visibility of the portal.
Remember that the Site menu is not only used to create new portal instances, but that it also allows you to quickly navigate all the portal pages.
Let's now uncover other options we can set either during the creation of our portal instance or after modifying an existing one. We can take a look at the Properties tab (after the second step) in the following way:
- Click on Site in the toolbar and then Edit Portal's Config for the financials portal.
- Click on the Properties tab; here you can choose different ways to manage the sessions in the portal using the Keep session alive field values:
- Always: The session will terminate after a specific period
- On Demand: The session will terminate after a specific application request
- Never: The session will not terminate
- The Show info bar by default is a checkbox to set the default value of a property for showing or hiding the information bar in the bottom of a portlet in any page.
The visibility of the information bar can be changed for each portlet working on the Portlet Setting, as we will see later in the chapter.
In order to remove an existing portal, you have to have administrator access to the portal. Suppose that we want to remove an old portal named oldFinancials. It can be removed by following the following steps:
- Click on Site in the toolbar.
- Click on Delete for the oldFinancials portal and then click on the OK button on the alert message.
Another option is to make the portal public in order to allow any user to navigate its pages.
Once you have created the new portal, supposing that you are authenticated as an administrator, you can edit access permission in this way:
- Click on Site from the toolbar.
- Click on Edit Portal's Config for the financials portal.
- Click on Permission Setting.
- As you can see, you can make the portal public simply checking the field Make it public. Notice that after checking this field, the Add Permission button will be removed from the form.
- Click on the Save button.
Now the portal is public for everyone, meaning that anyone can visit all the public pages without receiving a prompt for the login.
GateIn will create new portal instances using the default layout. By using only the provided GUI, you can add, remove, or change the presentation blocks in any page in the portal. Changing the portal layout allows you to set a default presentation setting for any new page in the portal.
Let's take a look at the layout editor:
- Click on Site in the toolbar.
- Click on Edit Layout for the financials portal.
- As you can see, in the layout setting we have two different sections:
- The portal layout
- The Edit Inline Composer
- Directly using the layout changes the order of the page blocks. The default page blocks included in a new portal are:
- Banner Portlet (GateIn logo)
- Navigation Portlet (portal navigation)
- Breadcrumbs Portlet (page tree)
- Page Description (copyright detail)
- Footer Portlet
- We can change the order of the blocks in any page of the financials portal by moving the Navigation Portlet below the Breadcrumbs Portlet.
- In the layout, leave your mouse pointer on the Navigation Portlet in the top-left section until the arrow became a hand.
- Then, move the Navigation Portlet under the Breadcrumbs Portlet.
- Finally, click on the disk icon in the top-right section of the Edit Inline Composer to save your changes.
- Let's now see the new layout by clicking on Site from the toolbar and then clicking on financials:
Before changing this layout setting, the portal was based on a different order for presenting the two portlets, as shown in the following screenshot:
- The Managing pages recipe
- The Managing registered portlets recipe
- The Assigning users to groups recipe in Chapter 4, Managing Portal Users