| This section describes in detail the options available for arranging and customizing a portal with viaContext™. Please note that the portal administration in the section 'Account administration' is designed to be used for the maintenance of a single portal only. To maintain multiple portals, please use the portal adminisrtration in the section 'System administration'. |
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| Domain |
| The unique name of the domain, under which the portal is accessible in the Internet. This can be a domain in the viaContext.net network (<YourName>.viacontext.net) or a fully custom domain. To assign your portal a fully custom domain, use the system administration console. |
| Using a domain from the viaContext.net network has the advantage that the domain does not cause additional cost and is ready for use instantly. |
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| Portal title |
| The title or name of the portal. The text entered here appears in the upper window border of your browser when you access the portal. In addition, the title is displayed in the header frame as long as no custom heading image has been provided. |
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| Home |
| The start page of the portal. The option menu for this field displays all folders accessible for the public portal group of the portal. After creation of a new portal, the option contains only the start page as only public available page at this time. |
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| Language |
| Various configurable portal elements like the search function, the object view of the folders or the detail view for objects contain text descriptions provided by the system. The language of these descriptions is set here. |
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| Theme / Style |
| The various configurable portal elements like the search function, the object view of the folders or the detail view for objects are usually displayed in a common viaContext™ style. When this style does not fit satisfactorily with your custom portal design, you can choose an alternative style or theme here. |
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| Activate portal |
| Using this switch, you can activate or deactivate the portal. When deactivated, the portal is no longer accessible in the Internet under its assigned domain. However, you and your account members can still access your content and your portal configuration by the use of the viaContext™ main page http://www.viacontext.com. |
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| Enable SSL/HTTPS |
| Using this switch, you can activate access to your portal through SSL/HTTPS, i.e. encoded access under the address https://<YourDomain>.viacontext.net. Access via HTTP is possible in either case. |
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| Show navigation frame |
| Using this switch, you can hide the navigation frame. Please note that the navigation frame, resp. the navigator contained in the navigation frame, automatically assembles all publicly accessible pages into a hierarchical and/or list based sitemap. When the navigation frame is hidden, you have to provide the navigation for your portal in your content pages through an adequate integration of links to the other pages. |
| Please note also that the options 'Enable login and registration', 'Enable guest registration without account key', 'Show search box', 'Exclude start page link from navigator' and 'Navigator title' are either contained in the navigation frame or depend in some way on the navigation frame. Thus, these options have no effect, when the navigation frame is hidden. |
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| Enable login and registration |
| When this switch is activated, the portal elements 'Login' and 'Registration' are displayed in the navigation frame. Each account member can log on to the system at the viaContext™ main page http://www.viacontext.com at any time. Thus, a login function integrated into the portal is not a mandatory feature. However, in some situations it maybe desirable that all account members work in a representative environment, which reflects the corporate identity of the organisation owning the account. |
| Whether you log on using your portal or via the viaContext™ main page, in either case appearance and feature set are identical. This means, that disabling a feature like the search box for your portal visitors has no effect on the features available for account members being signed on. |
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| Enable guest registration without account key |
| viaContext™ portals provide features to actively involve visitors into the content building process of your portal. In particular this maybe desirable for comments and discussion lists, which enables visitors to contribute feedback to selected content of the portal. However, these contributions should not be anonymous. For this reason, by activating this option, visitors can register themselves for a guest account without the need to enter the account key, i.e., any visitor of the portal can obtain a guest account for the portal. |
| The features available to named guests are subject to the access rights and limitations set by the account administrator. In either case guests are not allowed to upload and manage documents by themselves. The privileges of named guests are limited to personal working folders and comments, which also limits the possible consumption of resources available for the account. |
| Note that named guests are not subject to the limitations set for the various products and rates available for viaContext™. |
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| Show search box |
| Using this switch, the search box and the advanced search is shown or hidden from the navigation frame. |
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| Exclude start page link from navigator |
| The navigator contained in the navigation frame, automatically assembles all publicly accessible pages into a hierarchical and/or list based sitemap. Part of the publicly accessible content is the start page, but since the start page gets displayed at first anyway, when the portal is accessed, it does not necessarily have to appear in the navigator as well. Using this switch, you can decide whether the start page is included in the navigator or not. |
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| Navigator title |
| For account members being logged onto the system, the navigator in the navigation frame is divided into the workspace, containing working folders, and the archives section. Publicly accessible folders are usually working folders from the workspace (although archives can be released to the public as well), thus, this classification is not very meaningful for visitors of the portal. For this reason, the navigator of the portal consists of a single section and a single title only. This title can be set here. When this field is empty, no navigator title is displayed. |
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| Show heading frame |
| Using this switch, you can hide the heading frame. |
| Please note that the options 'Header page style' and 'Portal header image' are either contained in the heading frame or depend in some way from the heading frame. Thus, these options have no effect, when the heading frame is hidden. |
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| Header page style |
| This field can be used to customize the style of the heading frame. The definition of the style elements is subject to the international standard CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). For simple adjustments of the provided style definitions, no in-depth knowledge of CSS is required. It usually suffices, to modify the existing definitions to change for example the colour (background, text colour) or the font (font type, size, etc.). |
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| Portal header image |
| The initially text based header can be replaced with a custom image to improve the design and to provide a better match with the custom design of the pages available in the portal. The height of the heading frame gets automatically adjusted to the height of the header image. Nevertheless, the dimensions of the image should be carefully chosen to fit with the overall arrangement of the site. We recommend an image with 20 - 60 pixels height and up to 800 pixels width. |
| The adjustments made to the header page style in the previous field are still valid in case of an uploaded header image, although not all style definitions have an effect. |
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