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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.
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.
Extending social lists by using the digital data connector
The social rendering feature in HCL Digital Experience 8.5 is implemented as an Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal plug-in.

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.
    - 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.
      - Roadmap: How to work with social rendering
        Before you can use social rendering in your HCL Digital Experience, you need to set up HCL Connections integration. After you do that, your users can start working with the default view definitions that social rendering provides. You might want to configure and customize the social data that is rendered on your portal pages for your site visitors. In this case, you can configure and administer social rendering as required for your portal. You can also customize the view definitions, or create your own custom appearance components.
      - Working with lists of social objects
        You can design lists of social objects in different ways that are related to their content, visual design, and other characteristics. You can also use the HCL Digital Experience Tag Cloud portlet in combination with your lists of social objects, so that your site visitors can navigate social data based on tags. These tasks are usually done by page editors.
      - Configuring global settings for social rendering
        You can apply some global configuration settings to social rendering. These global settings apply to all social lists in your HCL Portal.
      - Administering social lists
        You can administer several aspects of social lists. For example, you can add your own social lists to the content shelf, or you can tune the social object caches for performance.
      - Customizing view definitions for portal site visitors
        You can customize social rendering view definitions in a number of ways. For example, you can determine the social data that is shown and the visual appearance of the data. You customize social rendering by working with the social list definition authoring template. For custom view definitions, you can also create your own authoring templates.
      - Adding widgets to a community
        As an owner of an HCL Connections community, you can define the set of widgets that are available in the community. For this purpose, you use the Customize option in HCL Connections. For example, you might choose to add the Blog widget to a specific community. This way, community owners have control over the set of services available in the communities they own.
      - Extending social lists by using the digital data connector
        The social rendering feature in HCL Digital Experience 8.5 is implemented as an Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal plug-in.
        The social rendering Digital Data Connector plug-in
        To implement the HCL Connections data integration, the social rendering feature in HCL Digital Experience 8.5 uses a custom Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal plug-in.
        Implementing custom HCL Connections queries
        HCL Connections provides a comprehensive remote API. You can use this API to access social data through Atom feeds.
        Dynamic HCL Connections source URL construction
        To dynamically construct HCL Connections query URLs, you can use the [Plugin:ConnectionsContext] and [Plugin:ResourceURL].
        Organizing your custom HCL Connections queries
        For the different query URLs that you want to use, you can create multiple dynamic or static HCL Connections query URL components. For convenient use of these query URL components, you can create a generic authoring template for all list definitions that you want to build from those queries.
    - 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.

Extending social lists by using the digital data connector

The social rendering feature in HCL Digital Experience 8.5 is implemented as an Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal plug-in.

About this task

This approach makes it possible to use the extensibility features of this framework to extend the social rendering feature with extra capabilities:

Realize custom queries against the HCL Connections server.
Retrieve data from HCL Connections services other than the search service.
Make it possible for portal site visitors to contribute social information through user interfaces that are generated by HCL Web Content Manager features.