How Do I Change the Appearance of a Portal?

When you change the appearance of a portal, you change the way a particular desktop or view of the portal looks and behaves. A Portal can have many desktops, providing the flexibility to define different appearances and behaviors for each desktop to meet the needs of the desktop's targeted users.

Once you have established the way you want your portal and desktops to appear to users, you sp] also can use entitlements and delegated administration to ease the production and management of desktops. Use entitlements to enforce business access policies that restrict portal resources to specific users, and use Delegated Administration Rights to determine which administrators or business users can define and modify desktops as needed. You have several ways to change the way your desktop looks:

• Look and Feels
• Themes
• Layouts
• Shells

Look and Feels

A Look and Feel is a selectable combination of skins and skeletons that determine the physical appearance of a portal desktop. Skins provide the overall colors, graphics, and styles used by all components in a desktop interface. Skeletons are used, in conjunction with skins, to render a portal.

You might change the Look and Feel of a desktop if you wanted to establish a consistent appearance and behavior for your whole desktop. You can then further customize its appearance by altering themes of individual portal elements.

For detailed information about Look and Feels, see:

• Overview of Look and Feels
• Assign a Look and Feel to a Desktop

Themes

Themes are similar to Look and Feels, but they are applied to a section of a portal, such as a book, page, or portlet instead of a whole desktop. A theme may be used to override the Look and Feel for a specific portal element, providing an additional layer of customization for your portal.

For detailed information about Themes, see:

• Overview of Themes
• Assign a Theme to a Portal Element

Layouts

Layouts control the position of the components (portlets and books) on a page. Using Layouts, you can reposition these components to change the way your portal looks.

For detailed information about Layouts, see:

• Overview of Layouts
• Rearrange the Pages in a Book
• Rearrange the Portlets on a Page

Shells

A Shell is the top-level container for a portal desktop. It usually contains a header, footer, and body. You can change the appearance of your desktop by changing the shell at the top level. For example, external visitors to your site may have a standard shell while internal users may have a shell with an additional section for non-public navigation controls.

For detailed information about Shells, see:

• Overview of Shells
• Assign a New Shell to a Desktop
• Manage Shell Properties

Related Topics:

• How Do I Entitle Users to See Specific Parts of My Portal?
• How Do I Set Up a New Administrator?
• How Do I Add Content to My Portal?
• Overview of Library Administration
• Overview of Portal Administration
• Overview of Portal Resources