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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.