Portal nodes and elements

A portal is composed of nodes and elements that are arranged in a hierarchical structure.

Portal elements are the components that make up a portal.

Portal settings (such as the default language for a portal)
Portlets
Row containers (rows)
Column containers (columns)
Skins
Themes
Pages
Labels
URLs

Portal nodes can be one of the following types of URL-addressable elements:

Pages: Pages display the content of portlets. They can contain other nodes, including other pages. Pages can contain row containers, column containers, and portlets. Containers are columns or rows that you can use to arrange the layout of portlets or other containers on the page.
Labels: Labels do not display any content, but can contain other nodes. They are used to group nodes.
URLs: URLs can launch any resource that has a URL, such as external websites (external URLs) or pages in the portal site (internal URLs).

Portal hierarchy

A portal has hierarchical rules that govern the placement of nodes and elements. Keep in mind the following limitations when you place elements in a portal. Portal Designer enforces these rules, which prevents you from creating a site that is incompatible with your server version.

A page requires a single top-level row or column. The top-level row or column cannot have any peer nodes.
A row is a child of a page or a column.
A column is a child of a page or a row.
A portlet is a child of a row or a column.
Sibling nodes should be of the same element type. Therefore, rows, columns, and portlets cannot coexist as peer elements.

Functions in the Design and Outline views such as drag-and-drop and cut, copy, and paste are available only when they work with a node for your portal project version.

Navigation hierarchy

The two methods of creating portal projects create different initial navigation nodes.

New Portal Project wizard	Import wizard
If you use the New Portal Project wizard to create a WebSphere® Portal project, the initial navigation nodes are displayed in the Outline view as follows: Home Task Page Definitions Site Map Login Edit My Profile	If you create a WebSphere Portal project using the Import wizard, the following nodes and pages are in the portal hierarchy: Home News Documents Personalization Search Site Map label About label Edit My Profile page Login page Task Page Definitions page

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