Editor’s note: New friend of the ‘Lab and former Sun guy Matthias Müller-Prove (@mprove) has posted the first two installments of his WebCenter Spaces tips and tricks.
He initially posted these internally to Connect, which he uses as his internal blog, an unintentional feature we created a long time ago. Not so long ago, the venerable SunSpace, which our own Peter Reiser (@peterreiser) created and oversees to this day, migrated off its old infrastructure to the internal instance of WebCenter 11g Patchset 4 we all use.
So, many of the content owners from Sun have become WebCenter experts overnight as their communities migrated to WebCenter.
Anyway, I convinced Matthias to share his tips and tricks with the outside world so that all the WebCenter users out there could benefit, and since we’re a WebCenter team, I’m reposting them here for your edification/education and for posterity’s sake. Thanks Matthias. Enjoy.
Tips’n’Tricks for WebCenter #1: How to apply custom resources in Spaces
by Matthias Müller-Prove
This is the beginning of a little series of tips’n’tricks for Oracle #WebCenter Portal Spaces. The background is our migration from Confluence – that we used at Sun – to WebCenter Spaces as a collaboration tool for the VDI engineering team. I want to share my insights so that other teams and users can get a smooth(er) start with WebCenter.
As a space owner and administrator you might have been to Pages and Spaces Actions > Manage > All Settings
… then opened the Resources tab, and skimmed through the lists of page templates, navigations, and skins. And you might have asked yourself, “which of these is actually used in my space?”
It took me quite some time to figure it out. And that’s the reason for this posting. You are looking at the wrong spot! You have to go to Pages and Spaces Actions > Manage > All Settings > General to look at the right column under Display Settings. This is the control area where you set the default Page Template, Skin, and Navigation for your space:
So in order to customize any of these for your space, you have to copy an existing resource, add your changes, save, go to the General tab and select your new Page Template, Skin, or Navigation. If you go now back to your space you can see the change in action, a new page template, an updated look and feel, or a new menu bar.
Tips’n’Tricks for WebCenter #2: How to create an Admin menu in Spaces and save a lot of time
by Matthias Müller-Prove
Objects in Oracle #WebCenter Portal have a visibility flag that is set to true or false. But you can also enter conditions. To make something visible just for moderators, you have to replace true by #{WCSecurityContext.userInScopedRole['Moderator']}
I use it to create an Admin menu. The visibility of the folder item in my custom navigation is specified as above. That means that all menu items under that new Admin menu are only visible for space moderators.
One candidate for such an Admin menu would be the Analytics menu item because it is not necessary to reveal it to all space members.
Another item that is extremely useful is a shortcut to Pages and Spaces Actions > Manage > All Settings. If you are a space admin you know how often you have to go there, and how difficult it is to navigate the mouse to the submenu item.
So under my new Admin menu I’ve added an item ‘All Settings’ with a link to http://YOURWEBCENTERDOMAIN/webcenter/spaces/YOURSPACE/admin.
You can get the link for your space via Pages and Spaces Actions > About > Share Link and append /admin. Note, that you have to check the Redirect flag under Options to avoid the frame-in-a-frame problem.
The following set of screenshot might guide you to create an Admin menu in your space.
#1 – Add a folder to the customized navigation:
#2 – Set the Visibility to mods only:
#3 – Add links to the new Admin menu:
#4 – Set the target path to Manage All Settings, do not forget to check the Redirect option under the Options tab:
#5 – The customized navigation with the new Admin menu:
#6 – The customized menu applied to your space:
