Customizing the Applications palette

WebSphere® Portal includes ready to use portlets that you can browse through in the site toolbar. To ease browsing through this set of portlets, WebSphere Portal supports assigning portlets to one or more categories. As the site administrator, you can create, delete, and modify categories and assign portlets to them.

Application categories

In WebSphere Portal, categories are represented as labels or external URLs and can be managed with the Manage Pages portlet. All categories are in the category root label that is identifiable by the unique name com.ibm.portal.toolbar.applications.category.label.root, which is a label in the hidden pages label.

Categories are shown by the toolbar’s Applications palette where categories appear with said localized title.

The following categories are available for immediate use:

All
Administration
Collaboration
Web Content
Tools

Creating new applications and categories for the site toolbar
You can add new categories to the site toolbar to organize your applications. After you deploy portal, you can customize the Create > Applications user interface in the site toolbar. Add categories that reflect your business needs and website organization.
Creating categories by using external URLs
You can also use external URLs to represent categories to organize your portlet entities. The advantage of representing labels, or external URLs, with categories is that administrators can easily add, delete, and modify categories by using the Manage Pages portlet as the administrative user interface. Since categories are labels, or external URLs, they can be assigned localized titles and descriptions, which can be set with the Manage Pages portlet as well.
Hiding portlets within Applications palette categories
If a portlet has been added to a category by adding it to a page that has been placed under a category label, remove the page it has been added to. Alternatively, if you do not want to delete the page, you can mark it as hidden.
Modifying and deleting Applications palette categories
You can easily modify or delete Applications palette categories.

Parent topic: Preparing the site toolbar