The Page Administrator Portlet is used to add and remove portlets from portal pages. The current version of this application does not deploy the portlet application war or persist page configurations that are held in pluto-portal-driver-config.xml.
The portlet application needs to be bundled in a war file as per the Java Portlet Specification. The war also needs to include proper PortletServlet servlet and servlet-mapping records in WEB-INF/web.xml. An assembly process has been developed to add these records to web.xml using Maven 2 (the pluto:assemble goal in maven-pluto-plugin) or Ant (AssembleTask). See the testsuite web.xml file for an example how the servlet and servlet-mapping records should look like after assembly (other items that the developer adds to web.xml should be carried forward into the updated file).
A custom portlet war deployed into the bundled distribution of Pluto also needs a Tomcat context descriptor with the same name as the portlet app war name (a.k.a. context name). This context file needs to be in the META-INF directory of the war file. Here's an example of one for a portlet bundled for a HelloWorldPortlet context (file name is HelloWorldPortlet.xml):
<Context path="/HelloWorldPortlet" docBase="HelloWorldPortlet" crossContext="true"/>The crossContext attribute allows Pluto, which is deployed in its own Tomcat context, to work with this custom portlet.
The way to deploy a portlet application depends on the app server that Pluto is running in. In the bundled distribution Pluto is deployed in Tomcat. In this case, you can use the Tomcat manager app to deploy the portlet war. There is a 'Upload and deploy portlet war' link at the bottom of the Page Administrator portlet that points to the manager app in the bundled distribution (this link can be changed for other app servers -- see the adjacent Help link). In the bundled distribution of Pluto, you can also simply drop the portlet application war into Tomcat's webapp directory.
To Add portlets to a portal page using the Pluto Page Administrator portlet, take the following steps: Select a portal page using the Portal Pages drop-down. Select a portlet application using the Portlet Applications drop-down Select a portlet in the adjacent drop down. Click the Add Portlet button.
To remove portlets from a portal page, take the following steps: Select a portal page using the Portal Pages drop-down. Select the portlet in the adjacent list. Click the Remove Page button.
The Page Administrator Portlet does not persist any portlet additions or portal page removals to the pluto-portal-driver-config.xml file. This must be done manually in the config file. Removal of portlets from pages must also be done manually in pluto-portal-driver-config.xml.
To manually add a portlet to a page in pluto-portal-driver-config.xml, a portlet child element must be added to the page element, which is a child of render-config. This element should look like this:
<portlet context="/HelloWorldPortlet" name="HelloWorldPortlet"/>
New portal pages can be created by adding a page element under render-config in pluto-portal-driver-config.xml. The uri attribute of the page element points to a JSP page that will contain a portlet (or portlets) defined in its child (or children) portlet element(s). The default 'theme' lays out the portlets in two columns (see WEB-INF\themes\pluto-default-theme.jsp in the pluto webapp for details).
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