Release 3.0.9
Part Number A90098-01
 Library |
 Solution Area |
 Contents |
 Index |
| Oracle9i Application Server Portal Building Advanced Portals Release 3.0.9 Part Number A90098-01 |
|
This chapter explains the planning steps you should take before you start using Oracle Portal to create pages and content areas. In particular, it covers a set of techniques you can use to define the overall structure of your Web content. Defining this structure greatly simplifies the process of actually creating pages and content areas.
This chapter contains the following sections:
This section briefly discusses some of the issues you should consider during each phase of the planning process. Of course, successfully planning and creating pages and content areas is largely a matter of experience: the more you create pages and use them, or receive feedback from others who use them, the better you'll be able to determine what works and what doesn't.
You'll find this section particularly helpful if you've never created Oracle Portal pages before.
The first thing you need to consider is who will use the page(s) you are about to create. Are you creating a single page that only you will see, or are you responsible for creating separate home pages for several different groups or individuals? If you're creating several pages, spend some time thinking about what kind of information each user or group requires.
Ask yourself:
Hint: Take a sheet of paper, write the name of each group or user across the top, and list the required information/applications for each.
After you've listed the information required by each user or group, your next step is to determine how to make that information available as portlets so you can plug them into the appropriate pages.
Note: A lot of what you can do here depends upon how familiar you are with the content areas and applications already established for your enterprise. You may need to enlist the aid of the individual or a group member for whom you are creating the page to find out the names of content areas, content area objects, applications, and/or components.
Order the repository by portlet provider to see if any of the content areas or applications you need are listed as providers. Content areas and applications appear as providers only when an object belonging to that content area (such as a navigation bar or folder) or application (such as a form or menu) has been published as a portlet. If you don't see a content area or application listed, but know it exists, use the Navigator to edit the object. Then, make sure the Publish As Portlet check box is selected.
After you've reviewed the portlet repository by Provider, change the View By criteria to Category to see if you've overlooked any information that might be useful for a particular user or group. Note that this is useful only if your portal administrator has already classified your portlets by category.
If the data or application you need does not exist, you may need to contact the appropriate person to either add the necessary content to a content area or create the required application or component.
Once you've obtained the data you need, start thinking about the look and feel of your page. The appearance of your page is primarily controlled by the page style, although the page banner has a big impact as well. When creating a page style, scroll through the list of Available Style Elements to set each element.
You may want to work with a graphic designer when doing so. Consider these issues:
Organizing a page means determining how to arrange the portlets you want to include so that they are visually appealing as well as useful. You may want to sketch out some alternatives on a piece of paper before you start working in the product itself.
To organize your page, consider:
The last step in the planning phase is to think about who will needs access to the page, and the tasks you want to enable the user to do.
In a classic Web site, the smallest component is a page. On the page are an assortment of links, images, and text.
In an Oracle Portal content area, the smallest component is an item, displayed within a container called a folder. Folders are similar to folders in a file system, with multiple items existing within a folder. The term page in Oracle Portal is reserved for a single Web page on which information is displayed in the form of portlets. These portlets may or may not include data from your content area. For more information on planning pages, see Section 1.1, "Planning Pages".
Each Oracle Portal item has a set of attributes. Attributes include information such as title, description, and author. Each item must also be assigned to a category, for example, General or Presentation. Users can search using categories to quickly display all items in the category. Perspectives provide another way to classify. Each item may be assigned to many different perspectives.
For example, you could have a content area that contains items related to entertainment. The content area's folder, category, and perspective structure is described below.
Notice that one of the categories is called General. This category is created by Oracle Portal. Because it is the default, it cannot be deleted. You must always have at least one category in your content area. Notice also that the 20th Century and Family Friendly perspectives have several child perspectives each. Both categories and perspectives may have child categories and perspectives
The key to planning your content area is understanding the kind of information that it will contain and how users will most often use the information. To make this process easier, we recommend that you use the worksheets provided in this chapter to help you gather the necessary facts to design a successful content area.
To prepare for the information gathering phase of designing your Oracle Portal content area, make copies of the following worksheets.
Item Description:
Who should be allowed to add this content?
Who should be allowed to view this content?
Who should control who can add/view this content?
Possible Classifications:
Mark the core content for this item:
File______ Text Item______ URL______ Folder Link______
PL/SQL Call______ App. Component______ Image Map______ Other:________
Standard Attributes for Items:
Name, Title, Description, Category, Perspectives (multiple), Author, Expiration Date, Image, Rollover Image, Keywords
Additional Attributes (may be displayed with item and used for searching):
| Owners | Content Providers | Viewers | Folders | Sample Items |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Complete one copy of the item worksheet for each item that you believe belongs in your content area. Try to come up with as many different example items as you can. Don't bother to create multiple examples of the same kind of item. At this point, don't worry about folders, categories, and perspectives. You will consider them in a later step.
Here is a sample of a completed item worksheet for the Entertainment content area:
Item Description: Movie review of new release, 13th Warrior. Would include image and a text review. Who should be allowed to add this content? Members of the movie team Who should be allowed to view this content? Everyone Who should control who can add/view this content? The head of the movie department Possible Classifications: movie, review, movie rating, kind of movie: action/adventure Mark the core content for this item: File______ Text Item ___X__ URL______ Folder Link______ PL/SQL Call______ App. Component______ Image Map______ Other:___________ Standard Attributes for Items: Name, Title, Description, Category, Perspectives (multiple), Author, Expiration Date, Image, Rollover Image, Keywords Additional Attributes (may be displayed with item and used for searching): Review date, movie release date, date available on video When you find yourself unable to come up with any more items that need different classifications or attributes, you're ready for the next step.
The user community worksheet organizes the information on the item worksheets.
You may have multiple values in each of the cells of the user community worksheet. For example, you could have two or three different groups of content providers and five or six different groups of viewers for any one folder owner.
In the sample item worksheet, the content provider was the movie team, the owner was the movie department head, and the viewers were everyone. It is possible that the movie team could be further divided in a manner to match the sub-folders in the Movies folder, or that these sub-folders would simply represent a more detailed level of classification that is best implemented via folders.
You are now ready to start planning your folder structure. The key choice you must make is what to implement as a folder, a category, and a perspective. The best way to tell the difference between a folder and a category is that folders are used by only part of your user community, while the categories make sense for most (if not all) of the user community.
Folders and categories both should be specific in nature. It should be easy to tell to which folder and category each item belongs. Perspectives are harder to separate. Review the perspectives for the sample Entertainment content area in Table 1-2, "Entertainment Content Area Categories and Perspectives" again. A movie review for a movie might be in the Family Friendly, Full Color, and 1980s perspectives, but will only make sense in one category, the Review category.
With the above in mind, review your user community worksheet again. When a single entry in the Owners column corresponds to multiple entries in the Content Providers column, it typically signifies a branch in your folder hierarchy. In your worksheet, note any classifications that you feel correspond to the owners and content providers you have listed on the user community worksheet. If a classification corresponds to an owner or content provider, it is probably a good candidate to become a folder or subfolder.
The Entertainment content area example lists both Reviews and Movies as possible classifications. Looking at our user community, we see that while all information managed by the head of the movie department relates to movies, only some of it is classified as reviews. The Review category could be listed as a possible classification for many sample items and in many different parts of the content area, whereas a movie classification might only be used in the movie folder and its subfolders. Therefore, it makes sense to make Review a category and Movies a folder.
Once you have gathered information about the kinds of items in your content area and the users who will build and view the content, you should carefully consider the specific attributes of your content area.
Think about which members of your user community need privileges to modify the content and appearance of the content area. You have already started this process by gathering content area organizational information in the user community worksheet.
The basic building block of a content area is the folder. Folders in Oracle Portal form the basis for content area pages. When you click on a link to a folder, a page listing the contents of the folder is displayed. Like file system folders, Oracle Portal folders are hierarchical. Each folder has its own security and visual style properties, which may or may not be inherited from their parent folder. As discussed in Section 1.2.1, "Gathering Information", the user community worksheet can give you a good start in designing the folder structure of your content area.
Since most security is applied at the folder level, your folder structure will often mirror the organization of the people who maintain and access your content area. Although you can implement item-level security with Oracle Portal, it typically requires less work to administer security at the folder level, that is, to give users privileges on folders rather than individual items.
In the Entertainment content area, the folder structure has been designed for content providers who are specialists in particular areas of entertainment. The Dance specialist should have control over the Dance folder and subfolders, but should not be able to add information to the Music folder because that is not his specialty.
Imagine that the content area was organized so that all categories were folders and vice versa. The Dance and Music specialists both would both need to have some control over the Review folder. As a result, access privileges would probably have to be maintained for each item. If the Review folder contained hundreds of reviews, this would quickly become a cumbersome administrative task.
It would be easier to have folders that correspond to the different groups of content providers. In the Entertainment example, this reversed folder-category structure would make sense only if the content providers were divided by the kind of information they knew about (reviews, venues), rather than the type of entertainment (movies, dance).
Remember that folders are the most efficient means for assigning access privileges. Regardless of the folder structure, the viewer of the Entertainment content area can easily access a page of music, dance, and theater reviews.
Oracle Portal content areas are especially good for classifying the items and other content that you add to them using categories and perspectives. The key difference between these two methods that an item can belong to only one category, but to zero or more perspectives.
Categories answer the question, "What is this item?" Because each item belongs to one and only one category, categories should be very basic classifications. Since content providers must assign every item to one category, the best categories are very distinctive and make it easy for your content providers to know which one to choose. Referring back to your item worksheets, if you find that your categories overlap, you should rethink the structure.
You can create categories in a hierarchy, with subcategories grouped under a parent. This can is useful when you have a large number of categories and perspectives. Be careful not to create too many of them to avoid confusion. If you have more than ten categories, users may be overwhelmed by the options and choose the first category that roughly fits rather than the most apt category.
In the Entertainment content area, the Review category is a very distinct classification that is useful across many of the folders. The harder it is for your content provider to choose a category for their content, the more likely it is that they will incorrectly classify their content, thus making it difficult to find.
Perspectives answer the question, "Who is interested in this item?" Perspectives can highlight special attributes of an item. In the Entertainment content area, the Outdoors perspective identifies items that describe something occurring outdoors. A user scanning the contents of one of the Music folders can see immediately which items are about outdoor performances or outdoor venues.
Review your item worksheets again. Then fill out the category and perspective worksheets below to sort through the remaining classifications for items that are not folders. It may be helpful to circle the folder for each item as it is listed in the possible classification portion of your worksheet. Your best categories are often those classifications that first seemed like they would be folders but were not used for the folder structure. Remember that categories and perspectives are most powerful when they can be used across many different folders in the content area.
| Category Name | Category Description | Child Categories | Example Items |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Perspective Name | Description | Child Perspectives | Example Items |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
As you design your content area, keep in mind how it will be used. Users who are looking for the information in your content area have no idea that the content is organized in folders, categories, and perspectives. They simply click the name of a category (a category link). This takes them to a list of items they are allowed to view that belong to the selected category. Clicking the name or image of a perspective (a perspective link) takes the user to a list of items in the content area assigned to that perspective.
Think about where you want to place your category and perspective links. A category link can be displayed:
Perspective links can appear in the same places as category links. You can also expose a perspective link next to each item assigned to the perspective by selecting Display Icon With Items in the Perspective Manager.
Folders, categories, and perspectives enable you to organize and cross reference your items so that it is easy for your end users to find information in the content area.
Examine the top two levels of your folder structure. These will display initially on the default main content area page. Verify that folder names are distinct and cannot be easily confused with one another.
Filling out the Folder Tree worksheet below will give you an idea of what your top two levels of folders will look like to a user. Keep in mind that not every user will have privileges to view every folder. Therefore you may want to make copies of the folder tree worksheet for different groups of users.
Watch out for folders that are too similar. If they are, users will struggle to distinguish between them, making it difficult to know where to put and look for information.
After you have built your content area, examine the content area page as a whole, for example, the navigation bar and folder listing. Sometimes users are looking for something very specific and at other times they are browsing to determine what information is available. Some users like to jump directly to an item, while others prefer to navigate to items sequentially.
Your content area page should serve all of these scenarios. You can include a search box on the navigation bar for users who would rather search than browse folders. Users who want to browse can use the folder structure, categories, and perspectives.
Consider whether you want the navigation bar to be a persistent part of the content area's interface. Oracle Portal enables you to use the same navigation bar throughout the content area, different navigation bars depending on the context, or remove the navigation bar altogether.
If you choose to have navigation bars, consider where to place them on the page (left, right, top, or bottom) and what to include in them. Navigation bars can contain a wide variety of elements such as a basic search, hyperlinks, and pull down lists. If you decide not to have a navigation bar, include other mechanisms for simplifying navigation within the content area.
When users add an item to your content area, they must its type item, for example, a file or URL). Oracle Portal content areas come with an assortment of base, or default, item types. You can add to these types as necessary. The following table displays the attributes for each of the base item types:
You cannot alter or add to the attributes defined for the base item types shown in the table. To append additional attributes to a base item type, create a custom item type. This allows you to collect additional structured information about items. Custom item types are based on the base type's attributes, plus any custom attributes you create.
You can also create custom item types from scratch, without basing them on a default type. In this case, the item type begins with only the most basic attributes, such as Display Name, Category, and Perspectives. You must add any other desired attributes to the item type yourself.
In your item worksheets, review what you entered in the Additional Attributes column. If you don't have any additional attributes, then the default attributes will provide all the information necessary to track your items. If you listed additional attributes, use the item type worksheet below to figure out how many additional item types you need for your content area.
You can reuse attributes that you create across item types. For example, if you add a Due Date attribute and use it in two different item types, a search for items with a specific due date will examine the Due Date attribute for items in both item types.
List all additional attributes in the column below Attribute Name. List a data type for each additional attribute (such as number, date, character, file, URL, etc.). In the cell beneath each Item Type Name label, enter a name for your new collection of attributes. In the cell beneath each Based On label, enter the name of a default item type to indicate the item type to which you want to add your attributes. Mark with Xs those attributes used in each item type.
| Item Type Name | Item Type Name | Item Type Name | Item Type Name | Item Type Name | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Attributes |
Based On: |
Based On: |
Based On: |
Based On: |
Based On: |
|
|
Name |
Data Type |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
If you want to associate additional attributes with the folder instead of the item, you can create a custom folder type.
Even the most diligent planners cannot always foresee every contingency. Therefore, you will likely encounter problems after creating a content area that will cause you to revisit its organization. The following sections describe common problems that may arise after you implement your content area.
Oracle Portal provides a Shared Objects content area where you can store categories, perspectives, styles, navigation bars, attributes, and item and folder types that apply to all of your content areas. If you find that you are constantly recreating the same things for every content area, consider building them in the Shared Objects content area so that you can build them once and reuse them in multiple content areas. Shared Objects can increase the integration and consistency between content areas.
You may be required to use item level security for your content area, but this is often a sign that you could have set up your content area differently. Keep in mind is that folders should be the main level at which security is applied. Look at your categories. Would your site work better if your categories were folders and your folders were categories?
You may need to change your settings to ensure that you have links to your perspectives.
Consider creating a folder based upon a saved search. You can add a folder to your hierarchy and define it as a search for all items belonging to a specific category. If you name that folder the same as your category, it will seem to users that there is a folder on the content area map holding all of the items in that particular category.
One advantage of this type of folder is that it is completely dynamic. As new content is assigned to the category, the search picks up the new items without any intervention from you. This method works just as well for any type of search that you want to save and make available to your users.
|
 Copyright © 2001 Oracle Corporation. All Rights Reserved. |
|
