Approaching Your Portal Getting Up to Speed

3-4 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Portal See Oracle Fusion Middleware Developers Guide for Oracle Portal. This book describes the technologies available for portlet developers, discusses how to choose the best technology to meet the given requirements, and guides developers in using the appropriate tools to deploy their developed portlets.

3.1.3 Key Concepts and Terms

This section introduces fundamental Oracle Portal concepts and weaves them together so you’ll have a good working knowledge of their importance; however, each concept is treated much more exhaustively elsewhere in this book. Much of what you need to know is depicted in the following diagram: Figure 3–1 Anatomy of a Page Group Let’s examine this diagram section by section: Hierarchy of Pages, Anatomy of a Page, and Reusable Objects. Hierarchy of Pages One of the first things you need to know is that in Oracle Portal, a portal is a collection of one or more page groups. At its core, a page group is a hierarchical collection of pages. A page is the face of the portal—what the user interacts with to access information and applications. Oracle Portal pages are flexible enough to contain any HTML content. They can be created and structured declaratively, through browser-based wizards, or defined programatically as JavaServer Pages. Information on portal pages is published as either portlets or items, both of which are described later in this chapter. A page group is exactly what it sounds like: a group of pages for which common attributes and mechanisms can be established that govern the behavior of the pages it contains. You can construct your entire portal within one page group, or use different page groups as sub-portals targeted at specific communities within your organization. Many vital decisions and configurations are specified at the page group level by you, the page group administrator. At the far left of the diagram, notice that the top of the page group is called a root page. Every other page within a page group is a sub-page of the root page. When you create a page group, a root page is automatically created for you using the same name as the page group itself. Root pages are often used to construct your portal’s or sub-portal’s home page.