Enterprise Portal Enterprise Portal Training

Communities, Pages, and Portlets

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Knowledge Objectives

• A Community Manager will be able to:

• Create and maintain communities and sub-communities.

• Create a new Community.

• Create pages within a Community.

• Configure community portlets and control page layout.

• Add existing portlets to a page.

Knowledge Objectives cont.

• Create new portlets for use by the Community.

• Configure and maintain community security, to include: Adding members Deleting members Editing members

• Configure and maintain security to collaboration projects.

Introduction

• The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has deployed an Enterprise Portal to allow agencies the ability to share information publicly and securely. While agencies will have much flexibility in building their web sites using this portal technology, there are Enterprise guidelines for certain elements of the design and branding, as well as certain policies and best practices that will both improve the quality and enhance the maintainability of portal sites as they are built. This training session provides information on how to build and manage a portal community, including best practices for certain aspects of community management. A separate document, the “How To – Use the Enterprise Portal User Interface Guide.pdf”, found on the “How To Guides” page of the Enterprise Portal Information site, provides detailed information on how to use enterprise portlet templates to create the basic branded elements of a community site such as the header, footer, left navigation, and governor’s portlet as well as the standard News & Media portlet for press releases.

Communities, Pages and Portlets

Probably the single most important user interface component for a website is the mechanism for navigating through pages. The way your site is structured in terms of communities and sub-communities will determine how the left navigation portlet presents your content. The two examples shown below show both a simple layout and a more complex structure.

Hierarchy/Taxonomy of Communities and Left Navigation

Hierarchy/Taxonomy of Communities and Left Navigation

The example below shows only a single level. There is one community with six pages. As a result, the Left Navigation portlet, which you will learn to create in the Enterprise User Interface Guide, looks like the following:

As a community manager or portal admin, you can change the order of the pages inside the community editor using simply up and down arrows.

Hierarchy/Taxonomy of Communities and Left Navigation

The OA Portal has a more complex structure with nine top-level communities.

• OA Home• Information Technology• Human Resources• public Safety Radio• Pennsylvania Justice Network• Strategic Services• Continuity of Government• Records & Directives• Travel Operations

Hierarchy/Taxonomy of Communities and Left Navigation

By default, the portal will always expand the top community when first visiting a site. In the example above, we see that the OA Home community has several sub-communities (in bold face). Each of these can have sub-communities as well, and the navigation portlet will expand as you click through them. As noted in the Enterprise Portal Governance Plan, you should not have nested communities more than 5 levels deep as the navigation labels will become unreadable.

Portlets Common to all Pages

There are a few portlets that are required for all pages. The Header, Footer, and Vertical Navigation portlets will be required for all public as well as internal community pages. There are always exceptions to the rule; for more information on exceptions and creating pages without the minimum required portlets refer to the Enterprise Portal User Interface Guide.

Header

Footer

Ver Nav

Portlets Common to all Pages

The portlets listed below comprise those that are available as agency templates for use on a public-facing government site.  • <Agency> Header• <Agency> Footer• <Agency> Vertical Navigation Portlet• <Agency> Tabbed Portlet• <Agency> Agency Search Portlet• <Agency> Governor Portlet  These portlets have already been configured by your agency’s Portal Manager.

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