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HCL Digital Experience Product Documentation
Welcome to the product documentation for HCL Digital Experience. Find information about how to install, configure, maintain, and use HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend solutions.
HCL Digital Experience 8.5
Learn how to install, configure, troubleshoot, maintain, and use Version 8.5 of HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend.
Content Template Catalog 4.4
The Content Template (CTC) is a set of templates that accelerate the process of building a website.
Assets contained in the Content Template
This is a reference guide for the assets that are delivered with the Content Template.
Content Template Catalog themes and styles
The main styles that are used in Content Template Catalog are used for themes, portlet content, and printed documents. Modify the theme and layout styles to change the layout of Content Template designs. Modify the general content styles and component styles to change the design of individual components.
Content Template theme extensions
Content Template Catalog sites that run on HCL Digital Experience 8.5 are based on the HCL Portal 8.5 theme with Content Template theme extensions added.

HCL Digital Experience Product Documentation
Welcome to the product documentation for HCL Digital Experience. Find information about how to install, configure, maintain, and use HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend solutions.
- HCL Digital Experience 9.5
- HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy Content]
- HCL Digital Experience 9.0
  Learn how to install, configure, troubleshoot, maintain, and use Version 9.0 of HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend.
- HCL Digital Experience 8.5
  Learn how to install, configure, troubleshoot, maintain, and use Version 8.5 of HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend.
  - Overview
    HCL Digital Experience (formerly IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager) empowers you to create, manage, and deliver engaging omnichannel digital experiences to virtually all audiences with responsive content, targeted offers, seamlessly integrated applications, and consistent branding across channels (web, mobile. and hybrid mobile/web applications and more).
  - Roadmaps to deploy your system
    Review the roadmaps to understand the common deployment, configuration, migration, and integration patterns.
  - Roadmaps to create your website
    Review the roadmaps to understand how to create your website.
  - Online Help
    This Online Help is made available in the HCL Digital Experience Help Center for quick references on how to install, configure, maintain, and use HCL Digital Experience.
  - Installing
    HCL Digital Experience provides flexible deployment options that range from proof-of-concept where you can examine and test functionality to a highly available and scalable production environment. Review the planning information to learn more about hardware and software requirements, high availability, scalability, supported topologies, and much more. Select your operating system and then select the 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 portal to do various day-to-day administration tasks. There are two methods for editing portal setup: using the administration portlets or the XML configuration interface. The administration portlets are a convenient way to make real-time updates to the portal's configuration. While the XML configuration interface is suited to more advanced administration, including batch processing of updates.
  - 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.
  - 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.
  - Troubleshooting
    This section helps you resolve problems, use diagnostic tools and tracing to capture HCL Digital Experience system errors.
  - Reference
    View information that can help you use the Digital Experience Help Center including directory conventions, terms of use, trademarks, a glossary, and more.
  - Glossary
    This glossary includes terms and definitions for HCL Digital Experience.
  - Content Template Catalog 4.4
    The Content Template (CTC) is a set of templates that accelerate the process of building a website.
    - Content Template overview
      You can use Content Template Catalog to mock up a site quickly or to build the skeleton of a site as a basis for further development. By using the templating patterns that Content Template Catalog is built on, you can supply a customized system for your users that lets them build their own sites. Content Template 4.4 requires HCL Digital Experience 8.5 with CF08 or higher installed.
    - Roadmaps for Content Template Catalog
      These roadmaps are designed to help you get started with Content Template Catalog.
    - Planning to use Content Template
      You must install Content Template Catalog on all servers you plan to use to develop, demonstrate, manage, or deliver a site that uses Content Template page templates and portlets.
    - First-time installation of Content Template
      The Content Template Catalog is installed with everything you need to build a site. You can also install the demonstration site to learn from seeing the design of a working site.
    - Upgrade and Migration of Content Template
      Content Template Catalog 4.4 is an update to Content Template 4.3, 4.2, 4.1.x, 4.0, and 3.x. When installed on an existing system, the newer version updates existing assets and installs new assets.
    - Customizing sites built with Content Template
      When you customize Content Template Catalog components, you make your website unique, with its own style, user interface, and authoring environment.
    - How to deploy sites built with Content Template
      The templates in Content Template Catalog help you build a site, with all the necessary content types, templates, and components. Use these templates as a base for your site and then customize it to place the site into the business context of an organization.
    - How to apply the multilingual solution to Content Template sites
      The HCL Web Content Manager Multilingual Solution consists of patterns, tools, and plug-ins for creating and managing multi-language and multi-locale sites.
    - Assets contained in the Content Template
      This is a reference guide for the assets that are delivered with the Content Template.
      - Components installed with Content Template
        When you install Content Template Catalog, you receive several types of components.
      - Sample sites, site templates, groups, and users
        The sample site and site templates are built by using CTC assets and are examples of best practice development. The sample groups and users are examples of best practices for user access.
      - Content Template libraries
        The HCL Web Content Manager assets for Content Template Catalog are split into the CTC Content, CTC Process, and CTC Design libraries. The demonstration site uses its own CTC Demo library.
      - Page Templates
        These page templates are used to create content ready pages for different content types.
      - Applications
        These applications can be added to your page from the Create Applications view when in Edit mode.
      - Page components
        Page components are used to display different types of content on a page. Some are used to display featured items or a block of text. Others display lists of items, or individual items. These content types can be added to your page from the Create Content view when in Edit mode.
      - Content Template Components
        These components are used by the Content Template.
      - Content Template Authoring Templates
        There are two types of authoring templates that are used by the Content Template.
      - Content Template Presentation Templates
        These presentation templates are used with each Content Template content type.
      - Content Template Categories
        These categories are used by the Content Template.
      - Content Template Workflows
        These workflow items are used by the Content Template.
      - Plug-ins for Content Template
        These plug-ins are used with Content Template.
      - Content Template Catalog themes and styles
        The main styles that are used in Content Template Catalog are used for themes, portlet content, and printed documents. Modify the theme and layout styles to change the layout of Content Template designs. Modify the general content styles and component styles to change the design of individual components.
        Content Template stylesheets
        Content Template installs with theme-oriented styles and content-oriented styles. The two types of style files are kept separate to support responsive web design and allow targeting of scripts at specific devices.
        Content Template theme extensions
        Content Template Catalog sites that run on HCL Digital Experience 8.5 are based on the HCL Portal 8.5 theme with Content Template theme extensions added.
        Content Template theme layouts
        In addition to the column and grid layouts available with the Portal theme, a few four-row layouts were created to work with the Content Template Catalog theme extensions. They are based on six-column and four-column grids.
        Navigation changes in the Portal 8.5 theme
        Content Template Catalog 4.4 running on HCL Digital Experience 8.5 uses a fixed two-level navigation system.
        Override pattern for styles
        Content Template Catalog defines most content styles globally. It then overrides the content style for the layout containers first and then for particular component types.
        Flexible page component layouts
        Adding flexibility to your layouts allows page components to adjust to fit in different parts of the layout. For example, you can use relative widths so page components adjust to the parent container, you can crop images to make them smaller, and you can use relative positioning of elements within the container.
        HTML layout styles for Content Template Catalog
        These styles cover the header and footer that are installed with the Content Template Catalog theme extensions.
        Layout styles
        These styles are used to format the layout of the page. Widths are fixed at this level. Internal styles use widths relative to the fixed widths, so when you modify these layouts, the rest of the content adjusts to fit.
        General content styles
        These styles are applied to the different types of data that is rendered in Content Template Catalog sites. For example, the title of an item is always rendered with “itemTitle."
        Page Component styles
        The page component styles are applied to the various types of page components that are used in Content Template Catalog. The styles are always applied to a container DIV. Subselectors are used to specify the internal formatting of the page component.
    - Troubleshooting Content Template sites
      Use the tips in this section to troubleshoot a site that is built with Content Template Catalog templates.
    - How to remove Content Template
      The procedure for removing Content Template Catalog varies depending on which components you installed, if you installed it on virtual portals, and if you added your own pages or templates.

Content Template theme extensions | HCL Digital Experience

Content Template Catalog sites that run on HCL Digital Experience 8.5 are based on the HCL Portal 8.5 theme with Content Template theme extensions added.

Content Template contributes modules to the Portal 8.5 theme that allow CTC portlets to be used on any portal page.

Content Template adds a profile that is called "CTC Content" to ensure that the Content Template modules are included in the page. All pages in a Content Template site should use this profile.

To implement the design that is used in Content Template, modules are defined that can be included in a theme profile. A combination of modules can be referenced to enable or disable certain Content Template features. The modules that can be referenced in a profile are:

ctc_content: This module delivers the required styling and scripts for displaying Content Template pages and portlets.
ctc_content_responsive: This module adds responsive support to the content, by using CSS Media Queries, allowing the content to work at different sizes.
ctc_content_devices: This module selectively loads styles and scripts based on the current device. Use this module if you need to support multi-channel devices without affecting the desktop site.
ctc_theme: This module optimizes the portal theme for easier content editing and includes the Content Template navigation, header, and search content module changes.
ctc_theme_responsive: This module expands on the ctc_theme module to allow scaling of the desktop site and responsive device support.
ctc_theme_devices: Use this module if you need to support multi-channel devices without affecting the desktop site.