Understanding Portal Templates

The PeopleSoft portal integrates content from numerous sources and presents the merged content on a single web page in a coherent, consistent fashion that keeps users within the portal framework. A portal template tells the portal servlet what content to place on the assembled page and where each piece of content should be placed.

A portal template is HTML code. However, in addition to standard HTML tags, the portal template can include PeopleSoft tags that are used for giving instructions to the portal servlet during page assembly. A normal browser cannot interpret these special tags. The portal servlet follows instructions in the PeopleSoft tags and then removes them before passing the final page back to the user’s browser.

The content in a template falls into four categories:

• HTML for the template itself.

• HTML for the main target content.

• HTML for the related target content.

• Additional HTML, such as for the navigation header.