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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.
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.

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.
    - 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.

Adding content: Site Toolbar or Site Manager | HCL Digital Experience

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.

Adding web content by using Site Manager

The Site Manager dialog is accessed by opening the toolbar and clicking the context menu next to a page name, and clicking Create Content. The content items created using this method are single pieces of content. They are based on authoring templates created by using web content authoring portlet. This method is useful for adding single pieces of content to a site.

Adding page components using the toolbar

The Page Components palette is accessed by clicking Add page components and applications from the toolbar. The Page Components palette is used to add more complex types of content to a page that are author-ready. Although a page can be configured to display a large number of different articles, the page component itself contains content that does not change and that ignores the context of the current article.