WebSphere Portal.Next Beta - WCM first look

WebSphere Portal.Next Beta is now available. You can get more infomation from the wiki link here.

I have just install it and have a first look at the WCM. First thing you will notice is the additional navigation available at the top area.



Going into the Edit Shared Setting, in the Rich Text Options, there are three option, Standard Editor, Legacy Editor and Custom Editor. By default Legacy editor is selected. To test out the Ephox editor, the Standard Editor have to be selected.



Below is the sample of the Standard Editor (Ephox)


If you go into the Manage Page in the administrator, there's a new option New Web Content Page. This option is available for portal 6.1.0.2 if you install the new Web Content Management Rendering Portlet. That is available at the Portal Catalog.


For this option you can select which content to be display in the page directly and also what template to be use.


It is just a short brief look. I will spend some more time on that later and look into the features in more details.

IBM Lotus Web Content Management Rendering Portlet

IBM have release an update to the Web Content Viewer portlet. You can download it from the portlet catalog.

The IBM® Lotus® Web Content Management Rendering Portlet provided with this package is a solution which updates and improves how the rendering of Web content is performed in IBM WebSphere® Portal. While the existing Web Content Viewer portlet (referred to in the WebSphere Portal documentation as a "rendering portlet") has evolved throughout several versions to implement sophisticated Web content rendering functions, it is still based on the deprecated IBM Portlet API. By contrast, the new JSR 286 Web Content Viewer has been entirely redeveloped based on the Java™ Portlet Specification 2.0 (JSR 286). In addition to the benefits afforded by JSR 286, the JSR 286 Web Content Viewer in this package also enables other features for Web content management, such as a new Web content portal page type and support for the standard search seedlist 1.0 format.

Highlighted Selected Content in Menu - WebSphere Content Management System

In a WebSphere Portal page, I inserted a few Web Content Viewer portlets. The top portlets shows a menu list the content. The bottom portlet will display the selected content from the list. The issue I had was highlighting the selected content in the menu.

From the forum, there were some suggestions but it didn't work for my case.

I manage to solve it by using the Content ID. The idea is, when the content is loaded, it can find which link in the menu is selected by the Content ID. Thus you can add in code to change the attributes.

In the menu component, I add in a class which is the content ID into the links.

<A HREF="<Placeholder tag="href"/>" class="<Placeholder tag="Idnum"/>"><Element context="autoFill" type="content" key="headline"/></A>

Then in the presentation template I added dojo code to put in another class into the selected content.

<script>
dojo.addOnLoad(function(){
dojo.query(".<IDCmpnt context="current" type="content" field="id"/>")
      .addClass("selectedContent")
});
</script>
<style>
.selectedContent{color:black;font-weight:bold;}
</style>

Thus when the content is loaded, it will search the page for the class <Idnum> and add in the class selectedContent. For the Idnum here, I use a class instead of id because in certain pages, there are more than 1 links to the same content.