Creating Look & Feels
Look & Feels are a combination of interrelated parts that control the
physical appearance of your portals. For instance, the Look & Feel includes
the fonts and colors used by a portal, the layout of portal components, and
the navigation menus used by a portal. The following topics explain how to
create and modify the Look & Feel in the portals you develop in Weblogic
Workshop.
Creating Look & Feel Files
A Look & Feel file is a simple XML file that determines
the skin and skeleton used for the desktop Look & Feel. When you create
a Look & Feel file, you can select the new Look & Feel in the Portal
Designer for your portal desktops.
Creating Skins and Skin Themes
Skins are the graphics, cascading style sheets (CSS), and JavaScript
behaviors that define button graphics, text styles, mouseover actions, and other
elements in the way a portal looks. Skins, combined with skeletons, make up
a portal desktop's Look & Feel. When you select a Look & Feel for a
portal desktop, the Look & Feel points to the skins and skeletons to use.
Using
the Look & Feel Editor
The Look & Feel Editor lets you modify the Cascading Stylesheet
(CSS) files referenced by a portal's skin. Using the Editor, you can view, at
a glance, the entire style sheet cascade for a portal's skin, the properties
assigned to a given style in the cascade, and the inherited properties of any
style. In addition, the Editor's point and click interface let's you easily
modify a style's properties and inherited properties and view your changes immediately.
Creating Skeletons and Skeleton
Themes
A portal desktop is a collection of portal components, such
as books, pages, and portlets, that have a hierarchical relationship to each
another. (Books contain pages, pages, contain portlets, and so on.) Since portal
components are largely XML files, rendering them in a browser requires a conversion
to HTML. That rendering is the function of skeletons.
Creating Layouts
Layouts provide the placeholders (table structure) for a page
in which books, pages, and portlets can be placed. For example, a layout that
uses three table cells provides three placeholders in which portlets can be
placed on a page.
Creating Shells
A shell represents the rendered area surrounding a portal
desktop's main content area (books, pages, and portlets). Most importantly,
a shell controls the content that appears in a desktop's header and footer
regions.
Modifying Navigation Menus
After you have created a portal and added books and pages to
the portal desktop, you can determine the type of navigation to use between
books and pages and set the default page that appear when users access the Desktop.