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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.
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.
Implementing interactions with social objects
Site designers can implement design components that support interactions between the user and the social data. For example, a user can post a new reply to a forum topic or delete a previous reply.

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.
        Customizing social list definitions by using inline editing
        You can customize your list view definitions by defining the following settings in inline editing mode. List view definitions are represented by content items of the social list definition authoring template. This customization is normally done by a web designer or a page editor.
        Customizing forum topic details view definitions by using inline editing
        You can customize your forum topics details view definitions by defining the following settings in inline editing mode. Forum topic details are represented by content items of the forum topic details authoring template. This customization is normally done by a web designer or a page editor.
        Request attributes for changing search queries dynamically
        The definitions of your list views are represented by content items of the Social List Definition authoring template. You can override specific elements of such list view definitions by using the request attributes that are described here. To work with request attributes in your web content, use the RequestAttribute rendering plug-in. Changing a list view definition by using request attributes is a way to modify the content of your lists dynamically, for example based on user input.
        Customizing the visual design of your view definitions
        You can customize the visual appearance of the markup that your social rendering view definitions generate. The markup generation is controlled by the appearance component that your individual list view definition content items reference.
        Creating custom authoring templates for list definitions
        Social rendering provides you a set of view definitions that you can use to add social data to your portal pages. These list view definition content items are created from the social list definition HCL Web Content Manager authoring template. You can create your own custom list view definitions by creating new content items from this authoring template. To customize social rendering even further, you can also create your own authoring templates to extend the data set that makes up your list view definitions.
        Implementing interactions with social objects
        Site designers can implement design components that support interactions between the user and the social data. For example, a user can post a new reply to a forum topic or delete a previous reply.
        Interacting with forums
        HCL Portal provides a built-in data sink that supports different interactions with forums.
        Creating a reply
        When you run a createReply action, the forums data sink uses a number of extra form fields.
        Deleting a reply
        When you run a deleteReply action, the forums data sink uses a number of extra form fields.
      - 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.
    - 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.

Implementing interactions with social objects | HCL Digital Experience

Site designers can implement design components that support interactions between the user and the social data. For example, a user can post a new reply to a forum topic or delete a previous reply.

About this task

To create such interactive designs, site designers need to implement an HTML form to send a POST action request to the Web Content Viewer portlet that displays the social list. The HTML form must include the URI of a data sink and parameters that identify the action that the designer wants to run. The portlet then dispatches to the target data sink that processes the form data and returns a data source that holds the result. For example, the result can be a JSON object that contains the status of the operation that is triggered with the POST action request and an error or success message. The portlet stores the result in the portlet session or as a private render parameter. To access the result in the formatting components, site designers can use the SessionAttribute rendering plug-in and the RenderParam rendering plug-in.

For more information about the action URL, render parameter, and session attribute rendering plug-ins, read Utility rendering plug-ins.

The following topics describe how you implement user interactions that are related to forum topics by using the social-rendering specific data sink. Additionally, you can implement further user interaction by using the generic XML Digital Data Connector data sink and the social rendering list-rendering profiles. For more information, read The generic XML Digital Data Connector data sink and Digital Data Connector profiles for social rendering.