17 Managing Portals in Production

A production portal is live and available to end users. A portal in production can be modified by administrators using the WebLogic Portal Administration Console and by users using Visitor Tools. For instance, an administrator might add additional portlets to a portal or reconfigure the contents of a portal.

During the life cycle of a WebLogic Portal application, it moves back and forth between development, staging, and production environments. This chapter contains information about managing portals that are on a production system.

This chapter contains the following sections:

• Section 17.1, "Pushing Changes from the Library into Production"

• Section 17.2, "Transferring Changes from Production Back to Development"

17.1 Pushing Changes from the Library into Production

Proliferation refers to the process by which changes made to the Library instance of a portal asset on the WebLogic Portal Administration Console are pushed into user-customized instances of that asset. For example, if a portal administrator deletes a portlet from a desktop, that change must be reflected into user-customized instances of that desktop. Before you propagate a portal, consider the way in which proliferation is configured for your portal.

If your desktops include a large number of user customizations, we recommend that you change the Portal Resources Proliferation of Updates Configuration setting to either Asynchronous or Off. This change reduces the amount of time required to complete the propagation.

You can do this in the WebLogic Portal Administration Console under Configuration Settings and Analytics > Service Administration > Portal Resources > Portal Resources Proliferation of Updates Configuration. The proliferation settings include Asynchronous, Synchronous, or Off.

For more information on proliferation and propagation, refer to the Oracle Fusion Middleware Production Operations Guide for Oracle WebLogic Portal. For database setup requirements related to using the Asynchronous proliferation setting, refer to the Oracle Fusion Middleware Database Administration Guide for Oracle WebLogic Portal.

17.2 Transferring Changes from Production Back to Development

WebLogic Portal utilities such as the propagation tools and the Export/Import Utility allow you to reliably move and merge changes between environments. The Export/Import Utility allows a full round-trip development life cycle, where you can easily move portals from a production environment back to your Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse development environment.

For instructions on using the propagation tools and Export/Import Utility, refer to the Oracle Fusion Middleware Production Operations Guide for Oracle WebLogic Portal.