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HCL Digital Experience Product Documentation
Welcome to the product documentation for HCL Digital Experience. Find information about how to install, configure, maintain, and use HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend solutions.
HCL Digital Experience 8.5
Learn how to install, configure, troubleshoot, maintain, and use Version 8.5 of HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend.
Setting up a website
Setting up a website includes, creating pages, adding navigation, setting up search, and adding content to the site. Themes are used to customize the portal's look-and-feel. Out-of-the-box templates and the site wizard can help you set up your portal site faster. You can add wikis and blogs to your site and let users tag and rate content on your site.
Preparing for content authors
Before content authors can create content you must prepare your site to be ready for content creation, including preparing the site toolbar, enabling inline editing, and creating templates.
Customizing Site Manager
You can configure Site Manager by setting portlet preferences for the Site Manager portlet in Manage Portlets.

HCL Digital Experience Product Documentation
Welcome to the product documentation for HCL Digital Experience. Find information about how to install, configure, maintain, and use HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend solutions.
- HCL Digital Experience 9.5
- HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy Content]
- HCL Digital Experience 9.0
  Learn how to install, configure, troubleshoot, maintain, and use Version 9.0 of HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend.
- HCL Digital Experience 8.5
  Learn how to install, configure, troubleshoot, maintain, and use Version 8.5 of HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend.
  - Overview
    HCL Digital Experience (formerly IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager) empowers you to create, manage, and deliver engaging omnichannel digital experiences to virtually all audiences with responsive content, targeted offers, seamlessly integrated applications, and consistent branding across channels (web, mobile. and hybrid mobile/web applications and more).
  - Roadmaps to deploy your system
    Review the roadmaps to understand the common deployment, configuration, migration, and integration patterns.
  - Roadmaps to create your website
    Review the roadmaps to understand how to create your website.
  - Online Help
    This Online Help is made available in the HCL Digital Experience Help Center for quick references on how to install, configure, maintain, and use HCL Digital Experience.
  - Installing
    HCL Digital Experience provides flexible deployment options that range from proof-of-concept where you can examine and test functionality to a highly available and scalable production environment. Review the planning information to learn more about hardware and software requirements, high availability, scalability, supported topologies, and much more. Select your operating system and then select the installation pattern that most reflects your business needs.
  - Configuring
    Run the following tasks after you install and deploy HCL Digital Experience. They address tasks that are typically run one time and have a global effect. Some configuration changes are made more frequently or do not have a global effect. These tasks are addressed in the Administering section.
  - Backup and restore
    Backup and recovery of data files and databases is an essential operation for any business system, particularly for data and applications that run in production environments. Create and follow a plan for backing up and recovering data on all tiers of your HCL Digital Experience deployment. IBM Installation Manager must also be included in backup and recovery planning. If you back up the HCL Portal file structure and then install a fix pack, your HCL Digital Experience and IBM Installation Manager become out of sync after you restore the HCL Portal file system. This condition is not recoverable.
  - Migrating
    Successful migration requires significant planning and preparation, understanding the tools that are involved, and careful execution of the appropriate steps in the order provided.
  - Integrating
    Integrate HCL Digital Experience with software such as HCL Sametime to enable your users to collaborate more easily. You can also use the unified task list portlet to integrate HCL with your backend business process software, such as IBM Process Server.
  - Administering
    Use the administration tools that are provided with the portal to do various day-to-day administration tasks. There are two methods for editing portal setup: using the administration portlets or the XML configuration interface. The administration portlets are a convenient way to make real-time updates to the portal's configuration. While the XML configuration interface is suited to more advanced administration, including batch processing of updates.
  - Securing
    Security tasks include setting up property extension databases and custom user repositories, configuring and activating SSL, and configuring authentication. In addition, tasks such as activating Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and NIST SP800-131a security modules and configuring external security managers such as Security Access Manager might be required to secure your portal environment.
  - Monitoring
    HCL Portal includes tools and features to help you monitor the portal site.
  - Setting up a website
    Setting up a website includes, creating pages, adding navigation, setting up search, and adding content to the site. Themes are used to customize the portal's look-and-feel. Out-of-the-box templates and the site wizard can help you set up your portal site faster. You can add wikis and blogs to your site and let users tag and rate content on your site.
    - Website building blocks
      Unless you are familiar with the HCL Digital Experience and HCL Web Content Manager website model, review the building blocks. Building blocks are the different parts that make up the website framework, such as pages, navigation, themes, content, content libraries, and more.
    - Creating reusable assets
      Use reusable assets to store or generate content that is used in more than one place in your website.
    - Building the website
      Building a website includes creating libraries, pages, and web content. You also create links and navigation to your content, and assign access to different types of users, such as editors and viewers.
    - Authoring tools
      There are multiple ways to create and manage content including using the site toolbar, inline editing, and the authoring portlet.
    - Preparing for content authors
      Before content authors can create content you must prepare your site to be ready for content creation, including preparing the site toolbar, enabling inline editing, and creating templates.
      - Adding content: Site Toolbar or Site Manager
        When adding content to a site in edit mode, a content author has the choice of using either the Site Toolbar or Site Manager. Site developers need to consider which option is best for their content authors.
      - Generate author-ready templates
        You can generate author-ready templates in Web Content Manager to provide content authors a set of predefined content templates that can be selected from the toolbar and used to add content to a page.
      - Page components
        Create page components by using Web Content Manager to provide content authors a set of predefined page components that can be selected from the toolbar and added to a page.
      - Enabling and disabling segments in the Add Segments view
        You can customize the Add Segments view so that you see only segments, only managed segments, or both segments and managed segments.
      - Preparing the site toolbar
        The site toolbar enables content authors to work with content from the website instead of using the authoring portlet. Customize the site toolbars to improve the authoring experience for content authors.
      - Creating custom icons for the Page Components palette and Web content authoring interface
        You can assign a custom image to an item type in the Page Components palette and Web content authoring interface. You can either use a single image or a collection of images that are bundled into a ZIP file, called multi-scale icons. Supported image file formats are PNG, JPG, and SVG. If you are using multi-scale icons, the collection of images must be compressed into a ZIP file. No other format is supported. You can add custom images by either adding a file element directly into the content, or by creating a reference to a file component.
      - Customizing Site Manager
        You can configure Site Manager by setting portlet preferences for the Site Manager portlet in Manage Portlets.
        Customizing the Create Content view
        The Create Content view, which is accessed by clicking context menu in Site Manager, is used by a content author to add web content items to a page.
      - Creating project templates
        Projects help content authors group and manage changes across the website. As a site administrator, you can create templates for your authors to use.
      - Customizing the Web Content Authoring portlet
        To customize each Web Content Authoring portlet for the people who use that portlet, you can edit the shared settings of each Web Content Authoring portlet on your authoring system.
    - Developing and managing content
      Use these tools and processes to develop and manage your website.
    - Delivering web content
      The type of delivery method you use to deliver web content to your viewers depend on the type of content that is being delivered, and the type of viewers your website is intended for.
    - Vanity URLs
      You can associate vanity URLs with portal pages and labels. Vanity URLs are short URLs that people can easily remember. They are shorter than full HCL Portal URLs. They are sometimes also called marketing URLs. You can publish vanity URLs for marketing campaigns through different channels, such as email or print. This way, you can use vanity URLs to direct customers to a specific portal page or content item. Interested site visitors who want to view your campaign can then remember or copy the short vanity URL and type it into the browser address field.
    - Social rendering
      HCL Digital Experience page editors can use social rendering to feature social data that is hosted on a remote HCL Connections server in the context of portal pages.
    - Setting up marketing campaigns
      Use these tools and features to setup marketing campaigns for your website.
    - HCL Web Content Manager Multilingual Solution
      The HCL Web Content Manager Multilingual Solution is a set of tools that are used to manage translated versions of localized and regionalized websites.
    - Syndicated Feed Portlet
      The Syndicated Feed Portlet for HCL Digital Experience offers enhanced feed subscription and presentation capabilities.
  - Staging to production
    During portal solution development, the solution is initially developed, tested, and refined on one server or a limited number of servers. The solution is deployed later on live systems, referred to as the production environment. The process of moving the solution from the development environment to the production environment is called staging.
  - Developing
    This section includes developer documentation on extending applications and development assets for HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager.
  - Troubleshooting
    This section helps you resolve problems, use diagnostic tools and tracing to capture HCL Digital Experience system errors.
  - Reference
    View information that can help you use the Digital Experience Help Center including directory conventions, terms of use, trademarks, a glossary, and more.
  - Glossary
    This glossary includes terms and definitions for HCL Digital Experience.
  - Content Template Catalog 4.4
    The Content Template (CTC) is a set of templates that accelerate the process of building a website.

Customizing Site Manager | HCL Digital Experience

You can configure Site Manager by setting portlet preferences for the Site Manager portlet in Manage Portlets.

Specify portlet preferences by using the Manage Portlets portlet. To access the portlet preferences for Site Manager, complete the following steps:

Note: Some features are not visible to users assigned to the Anonymous user role and the All authenticated users role, such as the tree view in Site Manager. To use Site Manager features within the toolbar, you must assign the User role to the All authenticated users group for the Site Manager portlet.

Click the Administration menu icon. Then, click Portlet Management > Portlets.
Locate the Site Manager portlet in one of two ways:
- If you are searching by Title starts with, search for SiteMap Portlet.
- If you are searching by Unique name contains, search for wps.p.SiteMapTab.
Click the Configure portlet icon.
Enter the preference name and value and click Add.
Click OK.

The following portlet preferences can be specified for Site Manager:

ibm.portal.explorer.tree.threshold = number: This preference specifies the maximum number of content items that display for a portal page in the tree view of Site Manager. If the specified number is exceeded, a link to open the content explorer displays in Site Manager instead of displaying the entire list of child items. The default value is 34.
ibm.portal.explorer.sites.blacklist=list_of_unique_names: This preference hides specific top-level portal pages in the site switcher control of site manager. This preference is only effective for portal pages that are direct children of the Content Root. The value must list the unique names of these pages, separated by commas. The default value is ibm.portal.page.Applications, ibm.portal.HiddenPages, ibm.portal.Administration, ibm.portal.Search, ibm.portal.Page Customizer, ibm.portal.sharedPages.