Tasks of the Portal Manager

The Portal Manager, which is part of CMS Fiona, offers companies and organizations the possibility to present to their customers and employees any kind of content in a common user interface and with a common look and feel.

  • Access restrictions can be applied to individual files or document parts meaning that access to these files is given to authorized persons only after logging in.
  • Furthermore, content can be made dynamic, i.e. adapted to individual users or user groups.
  • Last but not least, the Portal Manager supports Java Portlet technology which makes it possible to enrich content by embedding interactive components – so-called portlets – into it.

These functions can easily be accessed by editors and designers working with the editorial system.

Access Control for Content

Access Control makes it possible to restrict the access to content to users who are a member of a particular user group. To determine a user's group memberships, she is asked to log in as soon as she requests access-restricted content. If the authorization fails, the request is rejected. This applies to access-restricted HTML pages as well as binary content such as PDF files.

Additionally, it might also be desired to suppress hyperlinks to access-restricted content if the user is not permitted to view the link target. Alternatively, a teaser might be displayed. The Portal Manager offers several functions with which the desired behavior can be achieved.

Access restrictions can be applied to web pages as a whole or to parts of them. If, for example, you wish to offer special services to the users logged into your site, you can have the links to the corresponding pages displayed only for logged-in users.

Dynamic Content

What a web page contains is often not determined in advance (statically) but in the moment the page is delivered. This allows you let the page contain different content, depending on the conditions that are met when the page is requested. You might, for example, want to include links to the last five documents the logged-in user has viewed at his previous visit to your site.

Furthermore, content that often changes and is displayed at several locations of the web site can be included dynamically when the pages are delivered. Thus, only one instance of the content needs to be created and maintained. This avoids redundant work and reduces the time needed for exporting the pages into which the content is embedded.

Portlets

Portlets are independent and interactive components of HTML pages. Typical use cases for portlets are ranking and voting, logging-in, multi-page forms, or news tickers.

The Portal Manager includes a JSR 168 compatible portlet container. JSR 168 is a standard to which many application servers comply. Thus, if required, the portlets developed for use with the Portal Manager can be used with other application servers as well. Furthermore, JSR 168 portlets are modular, meaning that they are part of the content and not vice versa, making it easy to change their arrangement on web pages. The portal software of many other vendors requires a fixed page layout that can only be changed with great effort.

Compared to other mechanisms for generating content dynamically (PHP, for example), Java-based portlets have the following advantages:

  • The code is clearly distinct from the content. Portlets are embedded into HTML pages only by declaration (using npspm tags);
  • Object orientation ensures clear interfaces and data structures;
  • A higher grade of modularity has the effect that code can be reused much better.