What is a Portal Theme?

The pages folder

The pages folder contains the Freemarker templates used to draw the application pages required for all HARP portals to function. Within this folder, the following template files are required:

• portal-home.ftl - The portal homepage template.
• searchResults.ftl - The search results template.
• viewer.ftl - The page displaying a topic in the context of a DITA map.
• mapViewer.ftl - The page displaying a map or standalone topic.
• filtered.ftl - The page to display when a user attempts to access content that does not match the portal's metadata filters.

You're free to use the Freemarker <#include> tag to break these pages down into smaller reusable components, but these are the minimum templates required for the HARP portal to function.

The Freemarker template language allows the use of JSP tag libraries, of which HARP allows two:

• The JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL).
• The HARP Portal tag library. Documentation to come.

To use a tag library, include code like the following at the top of the template file:

<#assign harp=JspTaglibs['http://www.titaniasoftware.com/harp/taglib'] />
<#assign c=JspTaglibs['http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core'] />

The static folder

The static folder contains files, such as images and CSS or LESS stylesheets.

Files in the `static` folder can be accessed from pages using the themeFileUrl tag from the HARP JSP tag library. For example, the following tag can be used to address the file /static/images/myImage.png:

<img src="<@harp.themeFileUrl value="/images/myImage.png" />">

LESS Stylesheet Support

HARP natively supports CSS stylesheets written in LESS, which is a CSS-like language that provides many convenience features, such as variables and reusable style sets, that make it much easier to author and manage than traditional CSS. Any file with a .less extension will automatically be converted to CSS when it is requested by a page using the <@harp.themeFileUrl> tag.

The xsl folder

The HARP tag library includes a <@harp.content> tag, which renders XML content from a HARP project into a portal webpage, optonally transforming it with an XSLT stylesheet from the portal theme's xsl folder.

The full functionality of the <@harp.content> tag is outside the scope of this document, but for now an example should suffice.

<@harp.content url=itemUrl contextUrl=contextHarpUrl
  xsl="/topic/topic.xsl" />

This content tag will render the topic identified by the url attribute, as it exists as a member of the map identified by the given contextUrl attribute, and transform it to HTML using the /xsl/topic/topic.xsl file from the portal's theme.