Getting started with Demo Portal

This page describes how to use and build the Demo Hippo Portal.

What is the Demo Hippo Portal?

The Demo Hippo Portal is a demo project to be used as an example Hippo Portal. It can be also be used as a skeleton for your own portal project.

Why have a Demo Hippo Portal?

The four Hippo Portal components are building blocks for creating a portal, them alone will not get you a portal. You will need a Jetspeed2 based portal project that uses them in order to run a portal. This is what the Demo Portal Project is, an example of how to connect the provided building block to get a full blown portal.

How further?

Read the rest of the documentation on this page, it will explain how to get the demo build and running from source. Look at the demo projects code a bit, to see what is needed. Please also look at the Jetspeed2 documentation it will explain a lot of concepts used in the Demo Portal. Keep in mind that the Demo is a Jetspeed Portal using Hippo Portal building blocks. These two combined gives a Portal website with a CMS backend.

Requirements

Building and running the demo from source requires some external applications to be set up and running:

  • Install Tomcat 5.5.
  • Install Hippo Repository. This is a version of the Hippo Repository with some portal example content.
  • Have MySQL up and running. The demo works with a database named hippo_portal_demo so create one. You can adjust the name in the project.properties of the demo projects if you like.

Building the source

  • Checkout the demo-pa and demo-portal project from the SVN repository: 
    svn co https://svn.hippocms.org/repos/hippo/hippo-portal/trunk/demo-pa/ demo-pa 
svn co https://svn.hippocms.org/repos/hippo/hippo-portal/trunk/demo-portal/ demo-portal
  • Create a database named: hippo_portal_demo
  • Shutdown Tomcat if it was already up.
  • Put the following jars in tomcat/common/endorsed:
  • Go to the demo-pa project:
    • Copy jdo.properties.sample to jdo.properties and adapt the MySQL configuration to reflect your situation.
  • Go to the demo-portal project:
    • Copy build.properties.sample to build.properties and adapt the properties to reflect your configuration.
    • Build the demo portal and install it in Tomcat's webapps directory by running: 
      maven all

Using the Portal

  • Start Tomcat
  • Go to http://preview.localhost:8080/demo-portal/ to view the portal

Making your own Hippo Portal

The demo-pa and demo-portal projects can be used for inspiration. The easiest way to start your own portal is to just rename the demo portal. So what needs to be changed for own customization?

  • demo-pa:
    • The application name (demo-pa) is set in the src/webapp/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml
    • The portlet-app id is set in the portlet.xml. This id is used in the psml files to map to portlets. (e.g. id::portlet_name)
  • demo-portal:
    • src/webapp/WEB-INF/pages/__demo-site states the subsite name. This name is also configured in src/conf/hippo-portal.xml.
    • As a webapp name (demo-portal) the project.xml artifactId is used. This name must also be set in a rule-criterion in src/sql/min/j2-seed.xml (search for demo-portal_site).
    • The portal is registered to Jetspeed2 in src/webapp/WEB-INF/assembly/hippo-portal.xml under the name demo.

      See <property name="registryName" value="demo"/>