Get rid of the default portal (gatein.ear)

[mauss]

Hi Everyone

I have this issue, I have created my own portal by using the extension mechanism. I took the sample-portal and modify it accordingly to my requirement. At this point I just rename it to KP and now I have two portals the default one that comes in the gatein.ear and my portal which I called gatein-KP.ear. So for our next step is to move from the HSQL db in memory to a databases in Oracle. Now my questions are:

1.- We don't want to have two portals or 4 databases in our oracle db (jdbcidm_portal, jdbcidm_kp, jdbcjcr_portal and jdbcjcr_kp), Is there any safe way to get rid of the default portal (gatein.ear)? are there any steps for this?

2.- If the above step (get rid of the default portal) is not possible, is there any safe way to have each portal connected to their respective databases? that is, to have the default portal connected to the hsql in memory database and my portal connected to my oracle database.

Please be so kind to share your knowledge,

Thanks in advance.

Mauricio

[rraposa]

Mauricio,

You can't get rid of gatein.ear because your KP portal is an extension of it. You may not want 4 databases, but you will need them, and it is not a good idea to point the gatein portal to HSQL in a production environment.

The answer to your 2nd question is yes. In fact, you can't point two portal containers to the same database - they have to point to different ones. But like I said, you will want everything in your Oracle database in a production environment.

Hope that helps!

Rich

[mauss]

Thanks Rich for your quick response, it helped.

Ok, so using extension there is no way to get rid of default portal. That is clear. Now, besides the approach of customizing the default portal to satisfy my requirements, is there any guide or a way to create a portal from scratch?

Also I would like to know if there is any way to add portlets to the home page without using the gatein administration tool (Application Registry and Editpage/layout). Can this be done through the portal.xml? I can see the home page with portlets like banner, breadcrumb, etc, so there must be a way to add portlets to home page without using the gatein Application registry.

Thanks in advance!

[mvanco]

Hi Mauricio,

I think this doc: http://community.jboss.org/wiki/CreateANewPortalUsingExtension can help you with what you are going to to.

There is also a link for basic "scratch" portal as an extension which you can use and extend to your needs.

Good luck,

Michal Vančo, JBoss QA