Portal zones are implemented as pieces of a single portal HTML page. The portal framework wraps each zone inside a div element, and provides a title bar and collapse/expand widgets. Note that zones are not implemented as independent iframes (though the internals of a zone could be).

Zones can be configured to be initially collapsed when the portal page loads, and then execute a deferred load when they are expanded. This imposes some technical limitations that are discussed below.

While most zones do not depend on anything other than the current global context keys, some dashboard zones are context-sensitive, meaning they depend on the keys of the current object being displayed.

There are two components that define a portal zone: