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HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
Developing
This section includes developer documentation on extending applications and development assets for HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager.
Developing themes and skins
You can create themes using modules to contribute to separate areas of pages to provide flexibility, enhance the user experience, and maximize performance. To optimize themes on your website, use the theme optimization module framework. The framework separates feature-specific logic and capabilities from the theme code.
Getting started with Themes
Before you begin to develop themes, learn about the resources and the tools you can leverage to create and customize them.
Creating a theme
You can quickly create a new theme that is based on a template when you click the Create Theme icon.

HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
- Overview
  HCL Digital Experience provides a single access point to web content and applications, while it delivers differentiated, personalized experiences for each user across multiple touchpoints, such as web, mobile, hybrid mobile/web applications, and more.
- Supported migration paths
  Migration is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Supported installation and upgrade paths
  Installation and upgrade is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Getting the software
  New and existing users need to register at the HCL Software License Portal and download their entitled HCL Digital Experience package(s).
- Creating your website
  Review the following topics to understand how to create your website using the latest HCL Digital Experience.
- Installing HCL Digital Experience
  Review the planning information on HCL Digital Experience, then select your operating system and 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 HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
- 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.
  - Changing to a developer mode environment
    Install HCL Digital Experience and then immediately change to a developer mode environment. Use this environment when you develop applications, themes, portals, and portlets. Startup performance is improved within a developer mode environment.
  - Dojo and HCL Digital Experience
    HCL Digital Experience contains an instance of the Dojo Toolkit, a JavaScript library that is based on the Dojo Toolkit. When you develop components that use Dojo, you must be aware of how the portal uses Dojo, and the tips and restrictions when you use Dojo.
  - Extending HCL Portal class path
  - Developing themes and skins
    You can create themes using modules to contribute to separate areas of pages to provide flexibility, enhance the user experience, and maximize performance. To optimize themes on your website, use the theme optimization module framework. The framework separates feature-specific logic and capabilities from the theme code.
    - Roadmap: Creating and customizing themes
      Theme creation and customization are easy when you use the Theme Manager and download your static theme files by using a WebDAV client. This roadmap provides an overview of the theme creation and customization process. Links to detailed instructions for each step are provided in the roadmap.
    - Getting started with Themes
      Before you begin to develop themes, learn about the resources and the tools you can leverage to create and customize them.
      - Theme components and resources
        You can quickly create a new theme based on an existing template when you use the Theme Development Tools. The Simple Theme and the Portal 8.5 Theme are available for immediate use.
      - Granting access to theme development tools
        By default, theme development tools are available to the administrator only. You can grant access for managing themes to other users and user groups, such as a theme design team.
      - Theme Manager
        Use the Theme Manager portlet to create new themes from templates, edit existing themes, and copy, export, or delete themes with one click.
      - Manage Theme Properties | HCL Digital Experience
        You can modify the properties of a theme and its available skins in the Manage Theme Properties dialog. In the dialog, you can modify the properties of both WAR-based and WebDAV-based themes, but not all modification options are available for WAR-based themes.
      - Creating a theme
        You can quickly create a new theme that is based on a template when you click the Create Theme icon.
    - The module framework
      The module framework allows extensions to contribute to different areas of a page to provide flexibility, enhance the user experience, and maximize performance.
    - Understanding the Simple Theme
      With the Simple Theme, you can create, copy, and customize themes in minutes with just a few clicks and far fewer files than the Portal 8.5 theme.
    - Understanding the Portal 8.5 modularized theme
      Modern websites and browsers enable incredible new capabilities that can greatly enhance your user's web experiences. However, these capabilities are not without cost in terms of large page sizes and more processing in the browser when each page is rendered. These capabilities are worth it when you need them, but removing them for an entire site or including them only on pages that take advantage of these capabilities provides for more flexibility.
    - Customizing the theme
      The module framework allows themes to be customized in order to provide flexibility, enhance the user experience, and maximize performance.
    - Developing themes for a production portal
      Use the theme artifacts to package a theme for staging to production.
    - Device classes
      Device classes are used in HCL Digital Experience as an abstraction for common properties for the device of a client. For instance, tablet computers can be grouped into a device class tablets, since they share a form factor and possibly other traits such as touch interface, or additional hardware sensors.
    - Responsive Web Design
      Responsive Web Design provides content parity between mobile devices and desktop channels, which enhances user experience and brand consistency. Seamless changes in screen size, from small to large, are now possible while the order of the content is maintained. Content maintenance is simplified by having one site that is represented by one set of assets.
  - URL generation in HCL Portal
    Generating Portal URLs correctly is one of the most important tasks in programming an HCL Portal based application. There are several programming tools and techniques available for generating HCL Portal URLs in custom code. The following section introduces the programming tools available and discusses when it is most appropriate to use each of the tools.
  - Model SPI overview
    Models provide information that is needed by HCL Portal to perform tasks such as content aggregation or building navigation to browse the aggregated content. The information that is aggregated is represented through models that can be accessed programmatically by using the Model SPI (read-only). The information of a model is usually persistent (stored in a database) but can also be transient (computed and stored only in memory). Models can be represented by using a tree structure (nodes have a parent-child relationship), a list structure, or a selection structure (a selected element in a tree structure).
  - Controller SPI
    You can use the Controller SPI for portal administration. It allows you to modify portal resources. It enhances the read-only portal Model SPI by adding writable aspects.
  - User and group management
    The Portal User Management Architecture (PUMA) System programming interface (SPI) provides interfaces for accessing the profiles of a portal User or Group.
  - Portal Access Control interfaces
    Portal Access Control provides interfaces for retrieving and modifying and access control information of portal resources, such as portlets or pages.
  - Developing portlets
    Get an overview of the process of creating portlets, learn about the concepts of the APIs used to develop portlets, and view the samples to get you started. Also, learn about integrating features such as single sign-on, cooperative sharing of information using the property broker, and migrating Struts applications to the portlet environment.
  - HCL DX Portlet Bridge support for JavaServer Faces 2.2
    HCL Digital Experience 8.5 and 9.5 includes the HCL Portlet 2.0 Bridge for JSF 2.2. The bridge provides customers an interface to developing and running JSF Portlets.
  - Web Developer Toolkit for HCL Digital Experience
    Learn more about what you can do with the Web Developer Toolkit for HCL Digital Experience.
  - The Script Application
    The Script Application enables script developers to create portlets for HCL Digital Experience with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
  - The HCL Web Content Manager API
    You can use the Web Content Manager API to extend functions of HCL Web Content Manager.
  - Search REST API specification
    The following topics describe-s- the API calls to search HCL Digital Experience. You can search HCL Digital Experience web pages and content to find content that contains a specific text string in its title or content, or is tagged with a specific tag.
  - Extending tagging and rating by using service APIs
    Developers can enhance and extend the tagging and rating features of the portal. For this purpose the portal tagging and rating feature provides service APIs that you can use to enhance tagging and rating by your requirements.
  - How to create a custom launch page
    You can configure an authoring portlet to use a launch page of your own design instead of the default user interface.
  - How to create a custom HTML editor integration
    You can use custom HTML editors in all HTML fields of the authoring interface or specific HTML elements that are defined in an authoring template. Custom HTML fields are used to integrate third-party editors into the authoring interface.
  - How to use remote actions
    Remote actions are used to trigger actions from the HCL Web Content Manager application.
  - How to create custom plug-ins
    A custom plug-in is a reusable Java class that you create to run a task. You can create custom plug-ins such as custom workflow actions, plug-ins to run when a page is rendered, plug-ins to store multi-locale text strings and plug-ins to run when a file is uploaded.
  - Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal
    You can use the Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal framework to integrate data from external data sources on your portal pages by using HCL Web Content Manager presentation components. External data means that the data does not need to be stored directly in HCL Web Content Manager. For example, you can use DDC to render social data that you have on your HCL Connections server or on other social platforms in the context of your portal pages. Other possible data sources include news feeds, task lists, product catalog information, to name just a few.
  - Determining the current web content context
    To determine the current web content context of a portal page or Web Content Viewer portlet, you can use the WCM Page Context Service. This service provides the ID of the currently rendered item of a page or portlet.
  - REST service for Web Content Manager
    Application developers can use Representational State Transfer (REST) services to work with Web Content Manager. The REST service for Web Content Manager provides authoring access to content items and elements. The service follows the Atom Publication Protocol, and Atom feeds, and entries are accessible in XML (application/atom+xml) and JSON (application/json) format.
  - HCL Experience API
    This shows developers how to provision, configure, and use the HCL Experience API with the HCL Digital Experience 9.5 platform.
  - How to display data from external sources
    You display data from external sources, such as SQL databases, by using the same methods as you would when you create a website.
  - Instrumenting web content for Active Site Analytics
    You can collect information from web content for Active Site Analytics.
  - Java messaging services for web content
    Web Content Manager supports for the notification of events such as item state changes, or services starting and stopping. These notifications can be delivered as messages to the Java messaging service.
  - Reference documents
    Reference copy of API, SPI, Javadoc, and more, for HCL Digital Experience 8.5 and 9.0.
  - Developing basic PAA file applications
    Solution developers can create their own Portal Application Archive (PAA) files. The developers can then use the Configuration Wizard to add on their applications to their HCL Digital Experience environment.
  - Developing advanced PAA file applications
    Developers can create their own advanced Portal Application Archive (PAA) file. The advanced PAA file contains custom content. The developers can then use the Configuration Wizard to add on their applications to their HCL Digital Experience environment.
  - HCL UX Screen Flow Manager
    The HCL UX Screen Flow Manager helps operators, developers, and dialog modelers develop fine-granular, small split portlets. Learn to configure the sequence, transitions, and workflow of a set of screens.
- Docker and Containerization
  Find topic information about Docker and Containerization for HCL Digital Experience.
- Practitioner Studio
  Practitioner Studio is a newly designed user experience for HCL Digital Experience. Please see the following pages to understand how the new navigation is organized.
- HCL Experience API
  This shows developers how to provision, configure, and use the HCL Experience API with the HCL Digital Experience 9.5 platform.
- HCL Content Composer
  The HCL Content Composer delivers simplified processes for creating and managing Digital Experience site content.
- HCL Digital Asset Management
  HCL Digital Asset Management (DAM) adds a central platform to store and include rich media assets in Digital Experience site content to present engaging, consistently branded experiences across digital channels.
- The Woodburn Studio demo site
  The Woodburn Studio is a website that demonstrates the use of some of the popular HCL Digital Experience features.
- Reference
  View information that can help you use our product documentation including terms of use, trademarks, and more.

Creating a theme | HCL Digital Experience

You can quickly create a new theme that is based on a template when you click the Create Theme icon.

Use the following steps to create a new theme:

In the Theme Manager, click Create Theme.
Enter a theme title and an optional theme description.
Note: By default, the theme title is used as the system name. The system name is used for the WebDAV path, the theme unique name, and the skin unique name. If one of the following conditions is true, you must choose a different system name:

Invalid characters are used

If invalid characters are used in the title, a new field appears that displays the system name with all invalid characters replaced by underscores. You can overwrite that system name by entering a new system name with no invalid characters.

The system name already exists

If the system name already exists on the server, a new field appears in which you can enter a unique system name. The dialog checks whether the new unique system name that you enter is available.
Select a theme template. The Simple Theme template and the Portal 8.5 Theme template are available for immediate use.
After you enter a system name that is unique and includes only valid characters, click Create to begin the theme creation. When the theme is complete, the dialog displays either a success message or an error message.

You can also designate a theme that you created as a template. Only WebDAV-based themes are supported as templates. To designate your own theme as a template, add the following theme metadata to your theme:

com.ibm.portal.isTemplate = true

Note: Newly created themes are WebDAV-based. By default, they are connected to the WAR file of the template that you select, and you can reuse the dynamic content spots that are included in the template. If you want to create your own dynamic content spot, create your own WAR file with a module that defines the dynamic content spot ID. Then, you can reference that module within your profile and use that dynamic content spot ID.