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Virginia Tech is pleased to offer a uPortal 2.4.2 Quick Start with most of our My VT modifications applied. For a preview/summary of our changes, take a look at our online tour.

Please Post Comments

Please put comments at the end of this document if things are unclear/incomplete/incorrect and I will update the documentation. I'm just trying to get this out the door.

What's in the Quick Start

We did not apply all of our modifications to uPortal since some were specific to our institution. We tried to include all of the UI modifications and some sample fragments/channels to show you how they can be used. Here's a list:

  • My VT look and feel in "khaki" and "grey"
  • My VT customization interface which is a simplified Integraded Modes
  • Updated Content Subscriber channel
    • Search and browse in one screen
    • Keywords support for channel
    • Word stemming and case-insensitivity for searches
  • Sample CNET News.com channel XML profile
  • Sample fragments with example subtabs
  • navigate.jsp to allow navigation among tabs/pages
  • My VT frame for pulling in external content
  • Debugging XML output to logging enabled by default

Getting the Quick Start Running

  1. Download uportal-2-4-2-myvt-quick-start.zip - Link coming soon
  2. Unzip the file
  3. Go to the uportal-2-4-2-myvt-quick-start directory
  4. At the command line, run: ant hsql &
  5. Then run: ant tomcatstart &
  6. Access the portal at http://localhost:8080/uPortal/

reportal.sh

In the quick start directory there is a shell script named reportal.sh. We used a script similar to this while developing My VT to allow us to quickly reset uPortal to an "out of the box" state. This allowed us to ensure that changes we made to the XSLT, code, and DB worked cleanly.

Sometimes, getting uPortal up and running requires modifying the default database data to get customizations to work. At Virginia Tech, rather than modifying the database data, we modified the data.xml file (which is used to initially populate the database) so that My VT was properly configured right from the start.

This script will do the following:

  • Stop tomcat
  • Deploy any code/XSLT changes you've made
  • Reset the uPortal database using data.xml
  • Publish a sample channel profile provided
  • Publish the sample fragments
  • Start tomcat

Initial My VT Setup

When you first start the quick start, the portal will not have features such as the shared column or the customizable Home tab. These instructions will walk you through setting up these features on the demo user. The demo user is used for all newly created users in the system.

Shared Column

  1. Log on with demo/demo
  2. Click the Change Content button
  3. Create a new tab
  4. Rename the tab to: column::shared-column
  5. Click the Finished Changing Content button

Customizable Home Tab

  1. Log on with demo/demo
  2. Click the Change Content button
  3. Create a new tab
  4. Rename the tab to: tab::Chicken
  5. Click the Add Default Page link
  6. Click the Add Main Column link
  7. Click the Add Side Column button
  8. Rename the tab to: tab::Home*
  9. Click the Finished Changing Content button

Using Tab/Page/Column

Navigating Tabs and Pages

Use the navigate.jsp file to create links inside of channels to tabs, pages, and channels.

Example: navigate.jsp?tab=Home&

Common Tasks

Publishing a Channel
At the command line, run: ant pubchan -Dchannel=<Channel Filename>
Example: ant pubchan -Dchannel=cnet-news-com.xml

Publishing Fragments
At the command line, run: ant pubfragments -DfragmentFile=<Path to Fragments File from uPortal root>
Example: ant pubfragments -DfragmentFile=/properties/al/fragment.xml

Adding a User
At the command line, run: ant md5passwd -Dusername=<Username>
Example: ant md5passwd -Dusername=bcjones

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