Creating a virtual portal

Create a new virtual portal. This includes providing the title, description, and URL context for the new virtual portal, and selecting the initial administrative user group, default theme, and user realm (if applicable) for the new virtual portal.

To create a new virtual portal, perform the following steps:

Click the New Virtual Portal button. The Create New Virtual Portal panel appears.
Provide the following information:
- Virtual portal title: Enter the title of the virtual portal. This field is limited to 255 characters.
- Virtual portal description: Enter the description of the virtual portal. This field is limited to 255 characters.
- URL Context: Enter the URL context. This is the last part of the URL of the virtual portal and will be preceded by http://www.yourco.com/wps/portal/.
  Note: All virtual portal URL contexts must be built from the root context for the portal server and must be unique. You cannot use sub-contexts. For example, this URL is invalid: http://www.yourco.com/wps/portal/vp1/vp2. This is the correct format: http://www.yourco.com/wps/portal/vp2.
- Virtual portal hostname: Enter the host name for the virtual portal.
  Note: You cannot use the same virtual portal host name twice in the same portal installation. The host name must be unique for the portal installation. Host names must be valid host names that are either registered on your local DNS, or internally using the "hosts" file. Host names must be registered on your system before creating a virtual portal.
- User realm: Select a realm from the list. This pulldown appears only if realms are enabled on your environment. The default realm is portal. You can select other realms that you might have created. If you have realms enabled, but you do not want to use them for your virtual portals, you can deselect realms by selecting the blank option line from the pulldown list.
- Initial administrative user group: Enter the name of an administrative user group, or search for a group. To search for a group, follow these steps:
  1. Click the Search icon.
  2. Select the search type from the Search by: drop-down menu. The Search: field appears.
  3. Enter the search parameters in the Search: field.
  4. Click Search.
  5. Select the appropriate user group and click OK to continue.
- Default theme: Select the default theme for the virtual portal from the drop down list. Select the Preview icon to see a preview of the selected theme.
After you have provided all the information, click OK to create the virtual portal. Completing the steps to create a virtual portal also creates the virtual portal entity and calls the XML configuration interface script that creates the initial content tree.

Notes:

For advanced administrators:

If you want to use a custom XML script to create the content of your virtual portal, you can create an XML script file that specifies the initial content for virtual portals. Before you create the new virtual portal, add the XML file with your custom XML script to a WebSphere Application Server asset and then specify the asset and file name in the Configure mode of this portlet. By alternative, you can also copy the asset VirtualPortal.zip provided with the portal under a different name and modify it as required. For details about customizing the initial content of virtual portals refer to the portal information center section about virtual portals. Note: Do not modify the asset VirtualPortal.zip provided with the portal.

For JCR search collections

When you create a virtual portal, the creation of the JCR search collection depends on whether you create the virtual portal with or without content:

If you create the virtual portal with content, the portal creates the JCR collection by default.
If you create only the virtual portal and add no content to it, the portal creates no JCR collection with it. It will get created only when content is added to the virtual portal.

You can view the URL of the JCR collection in the virtual portal administration portlet. The URL looks as follows:
http://host_name:port_number/seedlist/server?Action=GetDocuments&Format=ATOM&Locale=en_US&Range=100&Source=com.ibm.lotus.search.plugins.seedlist.retriever.jcr.JCRRetrieverFactory&Start=0&SeedlistId=wsid@ootb_crawlerwsid
where wsid is the actual workspace ID of the virtual portal. The workspace ID is the identifier of the workspace in which the content item is created, stored and maintained. For example, if the workspace ID of the virtual portal is 10, then the URL looks as follows:
http://host_name:port_number/seedlist/server?Action=GetDocuments&Format=ATOM&Locale=en_US&Range=100&Source=com.ibm.lotus.search.plugins.seedlist.retriever.jcr.JCRRetrieverFactory&Start=0&SeedlistId=10@ootb_crawler10