Creating Portal Categories

This chapter explains how to create categories for portlets, pages, and styles in a portal application.

The following topics are covered:

About portal categories

Production-quality portal applications often contain large numbers of portlets, pages, and styles. exteNd Director gives you the ability to categorize these portal elements as a convenient way to group them for easier navigation.

Creating categories for portal elements

The following procedure shows you how to create categories for portlets, pages, and styles in your portal application.

Procedure To create a portal category:

Start the exteNd Director development environment and open the project of interest.
Select File>New>File.

The New File dialog appears:
Click the Portal tab.
Click Category, then click OK.

An untitled portal category descriptor opens in graphical view in exteNd Director.

Enter the following information in the portal category descriptor fields:

Field	What to specify
Display name	Enter a meaningful display name for the category
Category type	From the drop-down menu, select the type of category you want to create: component for portlets or components style for portal styles sharedpage for shared pages containerpage for container pages
Description	Enter a description of the category

Field

What to specify

Display name

Enter a meaningful display name for the category

Category type

From the drop-down menu, select the type of category you want to create:

component for portlets or components
style for portal styles
sharedpage for shared pages
containerpage for container pages

Description

Enter a description of the category

For example, here are the values entered for a portlet category:

pgNewPortalCategoryEx2

Select File>Save to save the category descriptor.

The Save As dialog opens. By default, the category will be saved as an XML descriptor file in the portal-category folder of the resource set. The file name will be the same as the category name.

Keep the defaults and click Save in the Save As dialog.

In the example above, the category descriptor is saved in a file called Content Management Portlets.xml. Here is what the descriptor looks like:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <!DOCTYPE portal-category PUBLIC "-//SilverStream Software, LLC//DTD Portal Category 5.0//EN" "portal-category_5_0.dtd">
  <portal-category>
       <display-name>Content Management Portlets</display-name>
       <description>Portlets that provide access to the content repository</description>
       <category-type>component</category-type>
  </portal-category>

Using page categories to filter content

See the chapter on working with page categories.