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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.
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.
Development processes
In addition to being a package of ready-to-use templates, Content Template Catalog also embodies a new pattern for site development that is based around page templates and microsites.

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.
      - Performance optimization for sites based on Content Template Catalog
        All of the usual guidance for optimizing HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager applies to a Content Template Catalog site. You should familiarize yourself with the options available. Apply all of the tuning and optimization that is recommended in the documentation, including changing appropriate JVM settings, DynaCache settings for HCL Web Content Manager internal caching, and database tuning.
      - Inline editing for Content Template pages
        Inline editing is a feature that allows users with edit access to a content item to edit that item from within the web page itself instead of using the authoring portlet. This feature is only available when displaying content by using a web content viewer portlet. Content Template Catalog templates are designed to allow inline editing for most content.
      - Access control for the Content Template
        The Content Template Catalog libraries have built-in access control, but you can refine the access further to differentiate between different types of users.
      - Workflow for Content Template pages
        All of the templates in Content Template Catalog set the workflow for items to a single workflow. You can modify this workflow or use one of the following strategies to integrate your own workflows.
      - Development processes
        In addition to being a package of ready-to-use templates, Content Template Catalog also embodies a new pattern for site development that is based around page templates and microsites.
        How to use source control
        The source control for Content Template Catalog contains all the code artifacts (plug-ins, text providers, context providers, JSPs), portal artifacts (theme and layout files, exports of pages, page templates, and portlets), and HCL Web Content Manager artifacts (exported libraries).
        Testing and deploying
        A copy of the production content libraries would be installed in test environments, and then used as test data during a development project. This allows a thorough testing of the deployment of the full package of changes, including HCL Web Content Manager assets, before deploying to the production environment.
        Multilingual design content
        To support multiple languages for the users of your website, it is necessary to use the Multilingual Solution. This solution requires separate CTC Content libraries for each language in your site.
    - 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.
    - 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.

Development processes | HCL Digital Experience

In addition to being a package of ready-to-use templates, Content Template Catalog also embodies a new pattern for site development that is based around page templates and microsites.

While Content Template can often be used only during the initial build phase of a site, it might also be used as the basis for a self-serve templating infrastructure. In this kind of environment, you need a development process for building templates.

For the Content Template software developers, what made this solution possible was the Portal Solution Installer. It allowed the developers to deploy applications, themes, pages, portlets, and content assets from a single package. This installer became the basis for the source control and build process.