Heretto Portal at a Glance

Heretto Portal enables you to instantaneously deliver content from Heretto CCMS to a customizable and dynamic portal.

Your content in Heretto CCMS is instantaneously published to Heretto Portal. — Figure 1. Content in Heretto CCMS is published to Heretto Portal

Features and Benefits

With Heretto Portal, you can:

Instantaneously deliver your content to a modern, responsive, and lightweight documentation portal or your own endpoint
Maintain large sets of versioned content (50,000+ topics)
Leverage strong SEO performance
Personalize content based on your audience

Structured and Faceted Search

The Heretto Portal search engine is built on Lucene and enables you to leverage full text, fuzzy matching, and weighted search capabilities within your Heretto Portal. You can also use your custom-built CCMS taxonomy metadata to add search facets in the portal so users can refine their search results.

User Authentication and Content Filtering

Heretto Portal enables you to specify different access levels on your portal by using the Single Sign On (SSO) feature and DITAVALs to identify who the user is and what content they should have access to. This way, your users are identified, authenticated, and delivered only the specific, relevant content to individual users.

Heretto Portal lets you to filter your portal content by associating a DITAVAL with a sitemap. This enables you to quickly do the following:

Hide internal content from your public portal
Filter content by properties like language, region, or product
Filter content by version or release

Customizable Look and Feel

The Heretto Portal look and feel is customizable to match your brand, typography, and style guidelines. Customizing and configuring your portal can be done directly in Heretto CCMS and enables a seamless integration with your other web properties.

Code Formatting

The Heretto Portal can automatically format code and highlight the code syntax in <codeblock> and <pre> elements. In the DITA source, you can specify the language type for each <codeblock> or <pre> element individually.

Introduction to Creating Portals

To help you get started quickly, this section introduces the key basics that are necessary knowledge before you begin building your Heretto Portal.

Getting Started: Essential Concepts and Tasks Involved

First consider what a user would see when they log in and what you want them to see. The structure of your portal can be a gateway that brings together diverse information, or one that enables personalized access to services based on the user's role within the organization. The design elements of your portal should therefore reflect your content strategy, brand, and be tailored to your target audiences.

Next, you will need some sample content. We recommend incorporating images and videos in your sample content, along with common DITA elements that your team will regularly use when creating content. This enables you to see how these will render in the portal.

Now you are ready to sign into your Heretto CCMS account, upload your sample content, and start creating your portal.

Note: Your Customer Success Manager (CSM) will provide you with access to portal environments for development work.

Necessary Developer Skills

HTML (HyperText Markup Language): You must be familiar with HTML basics. HTML is the most standard markup language for creating web pages. Familiarity with HTML is needed for constructing web pages with unique (and advanced) features and functions.
XML (Extensible Markup Language): XML will be required for portal development. XML will be needed to create the documents that will be shared via the portal.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheet): CSS adds style to your web pages. You will need to be familiar with CSS to give your portal a unique look, including layout and design. CSS is also used to ensure that your portal will properly appear on different devices and screen sizes.
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation): JSON is used to send information from the Heretto CCMS to a portal page. To customize your portal, you will need to work with the JSON format.

If you are looking to take advantage of personalization features, you will need to set up authentication. The portal supports single sign-on (SSO). Developing an SSO solution requires knowledge of:

OAuth 2.0
OpenID
JWT

To learn more, refer to: Portal SSO Overview

Portal Development Using Heretto CCMS

The Heretto CCMS Source Editor enables you to navigate through and edit the code for portal development. Alternatively, you can use any code editor you prefer and upload the edited source files into Heretto CCMS.

The Heretto CCMS Source Editor enables you to:

Edit the map XML source
Edit the topic XML source side-by-side with the user-friendly editor
Edit the Markdown, CSS, and JSON code
Find and replace, collapse and expand XML code

Other Source Editor features in Heretto CCMS include:

Detection and flagging for invalid code
Suggestions for and automatic closure of XML elements

For comprehensive instructions on editing code directly in Heretto CCMS, refer to the Source Editor Overview.

About Environments for Hosting Images

When customizing the portal design to reflect a company brand, adding custom logos and images will be necessary.

You will need to host these images in a separate environment. Contact your IT team to have these assets available and stored in an environment that your team will have access to, such as a GitHub repository.

For more information, refer to Adding your Logo, Favicon, or Banner

Scope of Supported Customizations

What’s possible with the Heretto Portal?

Look and feel:

Images
Typography
Color palette
Layouts

Portal functionality:

Define search facets
Define localized text
Access control
Personalization
Feature configuration

Use the list below to help you plan for portal customizations and create a satisfactory user experience, control languages, and ensure that visitors can easily access the information they need.

Table 1. Heretto Portal: Available Customizations
Domain	What You Can Customize
Structure	Table of Contents (TOC) Site sections Sitemap configuration Permalinks Link redirects Sharing option
Styling	Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) rendering order Stylesheets and CSS classes Fonts Images Default icons Output classes Favicon Footer Text strings
Site settings	Cache expiration period HTML description for the site Search Engine Optimization (SEO) crawling and keywords Domain name Environment variables Manifest
Content Discovery	Custom search facets Indexed searches for specific audiences
Personalization	Define User Groups OpenID Connect Authentication
Analytics	Google Tag Manager Google Analytics
Translation support	Portal content can be localized Portal interface can be localized

Planning Your Heretto Portal

Building a portal requires the combined efforts of content creators, developers, and business leaders. To help you develop and customize a portal to suit the specific needs of your organization, our Heretto team has created this step-by-step plan to help you succeed on your portal-build journey.

Planning Process

The Heretto team recommends following a planning process like the one below when you're making design decisions about your portal. Here are some steps we recommend for planning an effective and successful project:


Discovery Identify your audiences and your content delivery goals for your Heretto Portal. To ensure that the final outcome meets your expectations and requirements, we recommend building a list of high level requirements that your content team shares with your development team.
Design This involves designing the portal. Using this documentation to determine what's possible, we recommend making wireframe diagrams of the portal based on your needs. Both the content and development teams will need to work together to implement these wireframe designs because the content and page layout are dependent on the content structure.
Branding Based on your brand guidelines and supplied brand assets, we will work with your marketing department to access the brand book, and assets such as logos and images. Have your web designers add custom styling to reflect the brand identify of your organization.
Visual Design Using the wireframes and your portal development environment, create a prototype of the portal. This can be shared with your team for comments, suggestions, and feedback.
Design System Build a set of sample pages that conveys the site's default DITA element styling. Using your sample content, the portal will present typography samples, list types, note types, table formatting, task formatting and code blocks.
Portal Development At this stage, begin building the navigation system, authentication, and search configuration. Update logos, footers and any other portal page elements.
Content Integration With the portal development complete, integrate it with your production content. This will expose any additional tasks needed to create the ideal experience. When this is complete, share this within your organization or even with your partners and customers for feedback.
QA and Testing The final stage in the process involves a test of the portal with your content to verify that the everything runs as planned and is ready to launch. This will help all stakeholders to understand any errors. For this stage, we recommend having all the customizations and configurations pushed up to the staging environment.
Launch When you are ready for a production launch, work with your Customer Success Manager to coordinate a DNS cutover. This will enable the portal to be accessed by users on your web domain.

Developer Support

Our Heretto support team is available to assist you during the Heretto Portal development. In order to streamline the process, we request that you identify a lead contact on your team who will oversee the project.

Assigning a Development Lead

Organizations that opt to manage their own portal customizations need to designate a Development Lead who will act as the point of contact for both your team and the Heretto team during your portal implementation. That point of contact should manage all inquiries from within your organization and submit support requests for assistance.

The Development Lead can submit requests to our Support Portal in these ways:

Through our support page at support.heretto.com
Through the Heretto CCMS Help icon, located in the lower right corner of the system
By sending an email to support@heretto.com

CSM involvement

Your Customer Success Manager (CSM) can also assist you during the development of your portal.

In most cases, the CSM will direct you to submit a request to the support team. However, your CSM may be able to offer some advice and share general tips and recommendations on how to approach your Heretto Portal development project or point you to available resources.

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