Add static content to your custom theme

After creating a theme, we can begin to customize it by adding static content.

1. Export the content from the file store. For more information, see Export content from the file store.

2. Export the files that are required by your custom theme to the following folders:
   • themes
   • skins
   • layout-templates
   • common-resources

3. Save the files to your disk.
4. Add a web module to your existing custom theme. In the following example, an EAR file name MyEar was created for the existing custom theme. The EAR file contains a web module that is named MyDynamicContent.war that uses the context path /MyDynamicContent. If you created a WAR file instead, we must create an EAR file before we can proceed.

   1. Open your existing project, or import your existing EAR file as a project in the tool used to create the custom theme.

   2. Add a WAR file to the existing EAR file. In this example, the name is MyStaticContent.war and the context root is /MyStaticContent.

   3. The web.xml file for the new web module can be as simple as the following example:

      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
      <web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
               xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
               xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee 
               http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_4.xsd"
               version="2.4">
          <display-name>StaticHTMLContent</display-name>
          </web-app>

      The structure of the resulting EAR file looks like the following example:

      MyEar
          META-INF
              application.xml
          MyStaticContent.war
          MyDynamicContent.war

      The following code is a sample of the application.xml file:

      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
      <!DOCTYPE 
          application PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD J2EE Application 
          1.3//EN" "http://java.sun.com/dtd/application_1_3.dtd">
      <application >
          <display-name>MyEar</display-name>
          <module >
              <web>
                  <web-uri>MyStaticContent.war</web-uri>
                  <context-root>/MyStaticContent</context-root>
              </web>
          </module>
          <module >
              <web>
                  <web-uri>MyDynamicContent.war</web-uri>
                  <context-root>/MyDynamicContent</context-root>
              </web>
          </module>   
      </application>

5. Add the exported static content to the web module.

   1. Copy the static content that you exported in step 1 into the WAR file.The structure of the WAR file looks like the following example:

      MyStaticContent
        themes
        skins
        layout-templates
        common-resources
        WEB-INF
        web.xml

6. Create a whitelist and a blacklist. For security reasons, the WAR data source does not serve content until a special context parameter is set. This context parameter defines which files from the web module HCL WebSphere Portal is able to serve. We can define a whitelist by using a regular expression that matches the files that we want to make available. Then, in a blacklist, we can remove certain entries from the set of files that are available in the whitelist. A blacklist is helpful if we want to serve a folder but not a certain file within that folder. The expressions are case-sensitive. For example, WEB-INF is different than Web-Inf.The parameters are set in the web.xml file of the web module that contains the static theme content. In the following example, the context parameter is set to serve all files that are not part of the WEB-INF folder:

   <web-app> 
     ........
     <context-param>
     <description>A regular expression that defines which of the resources in the war file can 
                  be served by the portal war datasource.</description>
     <param-name>com.ibm.portal.whitelist</param-name>
     <param-value>.*</param-value>
     </context-param>     
     <context-param>
     <description>A regular expression that defines which of the resources in the war file cannot
                  be served by the portal war datasource.</description>
     <param-name>com.ibm.portal.blacklist</param-name>
     <param-value>WEB-INF/.*</param-value>
     </context-param>  
     ....
   </web-app>