Back in October I blogged about IBM’s new Content Template Catalog for WebSphere Portal. Now that I’m at Lotusphere, I just attended a session with more details.
An interesting piece that I didn’t cover the first time was inclusion of SEO features. New in Portal 7.0.0.2 is the ability for WCM to add title and meta tags to the <head> section of a page for SEO. Instead of a generic page name, the title of the page can come from WCM. V3 of the Content Template Catalog implements these features.
The overall design of the templates is vastly improved over version 2. Here are some highlights to add to my previous post:
- The theme for the catalog is based on the PageBuilder theme in portal. In fact, the developers copied the PageBuilder theme to use as a starting point just as the rest of us do. The styles included in the templates are now directly in the theme.
- Inline editing tools finally look professional as they are now images instead of just links.
- Pre-built portlets are available that implement the complex templates. Now you can drag and drop a list portlet onto the page to get full functionality.
- This version takes advantage of advanced javascript to implement scrolling slide shows and carousels.
- Components can be used directly or you can tailor them to suit your needs.
Overall, this version of the catalog template should be the first thing installed into WCM after you have the system installed.
