Creating a WebSphere Commerce Extended Site on WebSphere Portal
The following list highlights the main tasks
involved when deploying a sample WebSphere Commerce Extended Site
using Virtual Portal. This sample portal site consists
of a WebSphere Commerce page with a set of portlets that demonstrate
some of the WebSphere Commerce capabilities through WebSphere Portal.
These WebSphere Commerce portlets, when working together using cooperative
portlet wires, provide online shoppers with a similar shopping experience
to that of the WebSphere Commerce Madisons starter store, while providing
merchants with additional online business sales channels to other
portal environments. Each of these portlets provide a unique set of
WebSphere Commerce functionality that can be further customized by
business partners, integrators and customers.
Before you begin
- WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere Portal must be installed and setup using the Deployment Topology.
- Create and activate a new Extended Site from the WebSphere Commerce Hub store. See Creating stores for more information.
- Optional: Install a theme and skin on WebSphere Portal which will be used by the new Extended Site. For more information, see Deploying the theme.
- Install the MVCPortlet portlet application and have it activated to be used by all WebSphere Portal cluster members. For more information, see Managing portlets in your cluster.
- Synchronize the access rights for the Extended Site users by defining an equivalent set of member groups on WebSphere Portal. For more information, see Managing users and groups.
Procedure
- Create a new Virtual Portal using the WebSphere Portal Administration Console and predefined Extended Site theme. For more information, see Administering virtual portals.
- Construct the WebSphere Portal site layout using the WebSphere Portal Administration Console, or use a pre-constructed Composite Application template for the Extended Site. For more information about how to create new portal pages and add in portlets, see Managing pages.
- Assign the proper access rights to the portal site for the Extended Site user access, using the predefined WebSphere Portal member groups. See Controlling access.
Example
The following is a sample XMLAccess script file for creating
a sample WebSphere Portal page layout, using several MVCPortlet instances
to assemble a simple business-to-consumer shopping flow.
Instructions on how to execute this script can be found inside of the script file, located at WEB-INF/scripts/CreateSamplePages.xml.