The Page Administrator Portlet works with deployed portlet applications. This deployment can be done via the Pluto Maven plugin or Ant task. Alternately, you can deploy the war using the 'Upload and deploy portlet war' link on the bottom of the Page Administrator Portlet that points to the app server's war deployer application. Clicking on that link opens up a new browser window, so you should disable any popup blockers for this page.
The binary distribution of Pluto is built on Tomcat. Tomcat'’s deployer application is the manager application.
Use that application to upload and deploy the war. A properly deployed portlet on Tomcat requires that the war
have a context.xml file in META-INF containing a Context element and the crossContext attribute set to true
like this:
<Context path="HelloWorldPortlet" docBase="HelloWorldPortlet" crossContext="true">
The logged in user also needs to have a manager role also, which is configured in conf/tomcat-users.xml. In the binary distribution, the tomcat and pluto users have the manager role already set.
When the portlet application has been deployed, restart Pluto and use the Page Administrator Portlet to add the new portlet to a page. If you want to put the portlet on a new page, you must do so by manually adding a page element as a child of the render-config element in pluto-portal-driver-config.xml before you restart Pluto. See the Help mode for more details on doing this process.
The 'Upload and deploy portlet war' link can be changed to an appropriate administrative page when Pluto is deployed inside another (non-Tomcat) app server. This is done by changing the appserver.deployer.url property inside AdminPortlet.properties located in the WEB-INF/classes directory to point to the URL of an appropriate administrative page. The 'Help' link can also be changed to another help page using the appserver.deployer.help.page property. That help file needs to reside in this directory (WEB-INF/fragments/admin/page).