Preparing the site toolbar | HCL Digital Experience

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.

In the authoring environment, content authors use the site toolbar to access and add content and applications to pages. Content authors can also create and manage pages by using the site toolbar.

The HCL Portal 8.5 site toolbar is built with portal pages and portlets. The available toolbar tabs are implemented as portal pages, which are content labels or content pages, that are grouped under the toolbar content root. All content pages and content labels that are children of the toolbar content root show up in the toolbar navigation as toolbar tabs.

By default, the toolbar content root has the unique name ibm.portal.toolbar.ContentRoot and can be found under the hidden pages root unique name ibm.portal.HiddenPages.

The toolbar navigation supports two levels only. Content pages or labels that are appended to an existing toolbar sub tab does not show up in the toolbar navigation.

To extend the site toolbar with custom toolbar tabs, you can perform the following tasks:

• Create a toolbar first-level tab by appending a content page or content label to the toolbar content root.
• Create a toolbar sub tab by appending a content page to one of the existing first-level tabs or to a custom first-level tab.

To use the XML configuration interface for creating and managing your toolbar tabs, set this parameter as follows:

<parameter name="ibm.portal.toolbar.isToolbarPage" type="string"
update="set"><![CDATA[true]]&gt;</parameter>

For performance reasons, this parameter must be set on every toolbar content node. If it is not set, the toolbar tab does not have access to the context of the main page.

You can now start to add content to your toolbar. Add a portlet to the content page that your toolbar tab represents. For more information, see Implementing portlets for the site toolbar.

The feed that displays all portlets is cached after it is displayed. If you deploy a portlet after you view the portlets on the toolbar, the newly deployed portlet is not visible until the cache expires. The cache expires after one hour. Alternatively, you can look up the portlet in Manage Portlets and then go back to the toolbar.