WebSphere Portal 7 includes two new cool features: tagging and rating. With these new features you can easily allow users to tag and rate portal pages and web content items. Lets take a look at both of these features in action.
Tagging a Portal Page
Tag a page
When using the new Page Builder theme, tagging is already implemented on your page. Just click the Actions link at the top of the page, choose Tag as shown to the right. A dialog window appears in which you can enter your tags. Tags can be made Public or Private. Public tags can be seen by anybody. Private tags can be seen only by the creator. The tag window also shows community or public tags previously entered.
Portal also includes two new tag-related portlets. The Tag Cloud portlet shows all tags in either a traditional ‘cloud’ format or a straight ‘list’ format. A Tag Results portlet shows the list of pages or content when a tag is clicked in the cloud portlet. You can navigate to the tagged page or content by clicking in the results porltet. WebSphere Portal 7 also includes a Tag Center page which displays these two portlets. However you can add the tag cloud and results portlets to any page.
Tagging Content
WCM includes a new plug-in for tagging each piece of content in the system. All a WCM designer needs to do is add the tagging plug-in to the presentation template and the plug-in does the rest. To make it even easier, you can now pick the plug-in from a list when designing the template.
Rating a Portal Page
Rating a portal page works very similar to the tagging feature. Click Actions at the top of the page and then select Rate.
You will see a dialog window appear where you can select your rating. Just as with tagging, ratings can be made Public or Private. Ratings follow the familiar ‘star’ pattern, and you see the total rating highlighted when first opened.
Rating Content
Just as with tagging, WCM now includes a rating plug-in . To add ratings to content, simply include the plug-in in a presentation template where you want the ratings widget to appear. In the authoring portlet you perform the following steps:
Ratings plug-in
- Edit the presentation template
- Goto the location in the body where you want the rating widget to appear
- Click Insert Tag button and select the rating plug-in component. WCM inserts the proper tag in your template.
When that presentation template is rendered, the user will have the option to rate your content as shown in the picture to the right.
Rating a content item
Tagging and Rating APIs
Portlet developers can take advantage of the new tagging and rating features by using either a Java-based API or a REST-based interface. This page from the Portal 7 InfoCenter explains the two different ways to implement tagging and rating in your custom portlets.
What about tagging and rating individual portlets? How would you do that?
I need to display the ratings for content items in other places in the Portal, say, in search results, when cited in blog entries, etc.
I have read through the APIs section you cite in the WPS InfoCenter, and it is daunting! I just need a single example of a REST (or Java) API call,like:
stars = getRating(contentUID);