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:

  • No less than Java 5; use JDK 1.5 and not a JRE as Tomcat won't run on a JRE.
  • Install Tomcat 5.5.
  • Download Hippo Repository and unzip it in your desired location. This is a version of the Hippo Repository with some portal example content. For documentation on the repository, see here on hippocms.org.
  • 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.
  • Have Maven 1 installed as your build tool.
  • On the installation machine, both preview.localhost and intranet.localhost should be configured to map to localhost. On the Windows platform, the file C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts should be adjusted for that.

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:
  • Make sure you have included Hippo's Maven 1 repository location configured in Maven's list of remote repositories, for example in the [userhome]/build.properties. It is http://repository.hippocms.org/maven.
  • 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 the repository.
    • On Windows systems, you can use [repository-home]/bin/wrapper -c wrapper.conf.
    • On Linux-like systems, you can use [repository-home]/bin/fortress.sh. Note that you'll probably need to set the file's executable bit first, for more see here on hippocms.org.
    You can check that the repository is running by pointing your browser at http://localhost:60000/default (with username 'root' and password 'password').
  • Start Tomcat running the portal and portal application.
    • On Windows systems, you can use [tomcat-home]/bin/startup.bat.
    • On Linux-like systems, you can use [tomcat-home]/bin/startup.sh. Note that you'll probably need to set the file's executable bit first.
  • Go to http://preview.localhost:8080/demo-portal/ to view the preview of the portal (use intranet.localhost for the live view).

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"/>