Oracle WebCenter Interaction: Developing a custom login page

One can find some public WebCenter Interaction sites by simply googling "portal/server.pt".  In looking at a lot of public sites (and a few that are password protected) is that many don't bother to change the out of the box login UI.

Recently we turned on our adaptive page layouts, and while they aren't required for creating a custom login page, they do make it very simple.  The process involves the following:

1. modifying the loginpagelayout.html file which is located in \ptimages\imageserver\plumtree\portal\private\pagelayouts
2. creating a web service to point to the custom loginpagelayout file
3. enabling adaptive layouts for your guest experience definition and selecting your new loginpagelayout file

That's it!!!

Depending on how customized your existing login page is, you might also have to change the header/footer associated with the guest login, change the experience definition navigation options to portlet-ready navigation and possibly modify the basepagelayout file.

All in all, creating a custom layout is fairly straight forward in this manner.
Creating unique layouts for various sites using the same portal install can be done based on experience rules (URL, User-Agent, IP, Group, etc) and additional login page layouts.  Fortunately I didn't have to do that today, but it looks like it should be another fairly straight-forward change.

What do you think of our new login page?

Oracle WebCenter Interaction: Improving the user search experience

Recently we enabled adaptive layouts in our 10.3 WCI environment with the goal of redesigning the search results layout.  Out of the box the results screen is overly cluttered and out of date with modern UI's.

What we removed and why:

• Advanced search - unfriendly tool for users that are trying to find things quickly and easily
• Save this search - another unfriendly tool where a user would have to know to add the "Saved search" portlet to their My Pages
• Sort by - a world of options that no user takes advantage of
• Created date - modified date is good enough
• KD breadcrumb (on documents) - added clutter

What we added/modified and why:

• Categories - as a nod to the advanced search features, Facebook/Google/Bing/Yahoo side navigation we chose to add categories for All, Documents, Folders, Collab Items and Web Content
• Pagination - we chose to modify the UI of the pagination area to be more like Bing and other modern UI's which use mouse over boxes
• Search result row - by taking the modified date out of the column, moving it below the description and coloring it green, a more recognizable design is achieved

The final look: