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HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
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.
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.
Customizing the Applications palette
HCL Portal includes ready to use portlets that you can browse through in the site toolbar. To ease browsing through this set of portlets, HCL Portal supports assigning portlets to one or more categories. As the site administrator, you can create, delete, and modify categories and assign portlets to them.

HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
- Overview
  HCL Digital Experience provides a single access point to web content and applications, while it delivers differentiated, personalized experiences for each user across multiple touchpoints, such as web, mobile, hybrid mobile/web applications, and more.
- Supported migration paths
  Migration is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Supported installation and upgrade paths
  Installation and upgrade is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Getting the software
  New and existing users need to register at the HCL Software License Portal and download their entitled HCL Digital Experience package(s).
- Creating your website
  Review the following topics to understand how to create your website using the latest HCL Digital Experience.
- Installing HCL Digital Experience
  Review the planning information on HCL Digital Experience, then select your operating system and 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 HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
- 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.
      - Configuring the behavior of toolbar tabs
        You can use the following page parameters to configure the main properties of your toolbar tabs.
      - Configuring display options in the primary and secondary toolbar frames
        When you open the site toolbar, Site Manager automatically opens in the primary toolbar frame. You can control what displays in the primary and secondary toolbar frames by setting page parameters on the hidden page Toolbar Content Root.
      - Disabling the toolbar logo
        You can disable the toolbar logo for the entire portal that includes all the virtual portals or for a specific virtual portal.
      - Implementing portlets for the site toolbar
        The toolbar tabs of the Portal 8.5 site toolbar are represented as portal pages. The content of the toolbar tabs can be implemented by using portlets.
      - Customizing the More menu of the action bar
        The More menu is a public extension point that you can use to plug in your own menu actions that you want to make available in the action bar.
      - Customizing the Page Component palette
        The Page Component palette, which is accessed from the site toolbar, contains the content items a content author can add to a page. This was known as the Content palette prior to CF08.
      - Customizing the Applications palette
        HCL Portal includes ready to use portlets that you can browse through in the site toolbar. To ease browsing through this set of portlets, HCL Portal supports assigning portlets to one or more categories. As the site administrator, you can create, delete, and modify categories and assign portlets to them.
        Creating new applications and categories for the site toolbar
        You can add new categories to the site toolbar to organize your applications. After you deploy portal, you can customize the Create > Applications user interface in the site toolbar. Add categories that reflect your business needs and website organization.
        Creating categories by using external URLs
        You can also use external URLs to represent categories to organize your portlet entities. The advantage of representing labels, or external URLs, with categories is that administrators can easily add, delete, and modify categories by using the Manage Pages portlet as the administrative user interface. Since categories are labels, or external URLs, they can be assigned localized titles and descriptions, which can be set with the Manage Pages portlet as well.
        Hiding portlets within Applications palette categories
        If a portlet has been added to a category by adding it to a page that has been placed under a category label, remove the page it has been added to. Alternatively, if you do not want to delete the page, you can mark it as hidden.
        Modifying and deleting Applications palette categories
        You can easily modify or delete Applications palette categories.
      - Customizing page creation and page editing options
        When content authors edit a page, they can choose layouts and styles. As an administrator, you can customize these page editing options. If you are on Combined Cumulative Fix 8 or later, you can also customize page creation for your content authors.
      - Customizing toolbar layouts
        The toolbar layouts can be customized by adding theme metadata to the theme deployment file.
      - Customizing site manager User Interface
        The site manager user interface can be customized by adding additional functionality.
      - Controlling the visibility of the site toolbar and toolbar tabs
        You can control the visibility of the site toolbar and single toolbar tabs per virtual portal by using Portal Access Control.
      - Removing the site toolbar on a production server
        The site toolbar provides access to editing features for managed pages, including adding and editing pages and web content. Although essential for an authoring server, it is recommended that you disable the site toolbar on a delivery server. You can disable the toolbar for an entire portal or for specific virtual portals.
      - Delete pages and their contents
        When you delete a page (or tree of pages) while using Site Manager, the page, its child pages or child content are also deleted. But, the content that is referred by WCM rendering portlets on the page is not deleted. Beginning with CF205, a new feature is added that allows you to delete the page as well as the content that is referenced by the WCM rendering portlets on the page. The new delete feature comes disabled by default, and you can enable the same by setting the following in the WP ConfigService Resources Environment Provider:
      - Disabling the language switcher
        The language switcher allows you to switch from any of the supported languages. This feature is available only for authenticated portal users.
    - 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.
    - 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.
- Docker and Containerization
  Find topic information about Docker and Containerization for HCL Digital Experience.
- Practitioner Studio
  Practitioner Studio is a newly designed user experience for HCL Digital Experience. Please see the following pages to understand how the new navigation is organized.
- HCL Experience API
  This shows developers how to provision, configure, and use the HCL Experience API with the HCL Digital Experience 9.5 platform.
- HCL Content Composer
  The HCL Content Composer delivers simplified processes for creating and managing Digital Experience site content.
- HCL Digital Asset Management
  HCL Digital Asset Management (DAM) adds a central platform to store and include rich media assets in Digital Experience site content to present engaging, consistently branded experiences across digital channels.
- The Woodburn Studio demo site
  The Woodburn Studio is a website that demonstrates the use of some of the popular HCL Digital Experience features.
- Reference
  View information that can help you use our product documentation including terms of use, trademarks, and more.

Customizing the Applications palette | HCL Digital Experience

HCL Portal includes ready to use portlets that you can browse through in the site toolbar. To ease browsing through this set of portlets, HCL Portal supports assigning portlets to one or more categories. As the site administrator, you can create, delete, and modify categories and assign portlets to them.

Application categories

In HCL Portal, categories are represented as labels or external URLs and can be managed with the Manage Pages portlet. All categories are in the category root label that is identifiable by the unique name com.ibm.portal.toolbar.applications.category.label.root, which is a label in the hidden pages label.

Categories are shown by the toolbar’s Applications palette where categories appear with said localized title.

The following categories are available for immediate use:

All
Administration
Collaboration
Web Content
Tools

Note: Application Palette categories will only be displayed when allowing all portlets on a page underneath Manage Page Properties > Advanced > Allow All Portlets. If you allow only a subset of whitelisted portlets, the categories will be hidden and the whitelisted portlets will be displayed as the only category.