WebLogic Portal uses the concept of skeletons for handling the look and feel for the portals.  Each skeleton JSP (or at least most of them) contains a context which may or may not contain children.  The basics of skeletons can be found in the Oracle documentation, but it doesn’t include documentation of the out-of-the-box structure.

Based on some advice from this thread, I decided to identify the default structure for a brand new portal to help others avoid banging their head against the wall for a few days like I did.

The structure of the skeletons does appear to follow the structure defined in the .shell file, but that’s not really obvious from the documentation either.

Without further adieu, here’s the structure and the tag names for that structure. N.B. This was a newly created .portal with a basic JSP portlet throw into the layout.

  <application:desktop>  - desktop.jsp
    <application:shell> - shell.jsp
    <application:head> - head.jsp
    <application:body> - body.jsp
      <application:header> - header.jsp
      <page:book> - book.jsp
        <page:menu/> - singlelevelmenu.jsp OR multilevelmenu.jsp
        CONTENT - no skeleton for this piece
          <page:page> - page.jsp
            <layout:flowLayout> - flowLayout.jsp - there could be other layout types here
              <layout:placeholder>
                <portlet:portlet> - no skeleton for this piece
                  <window:titlebar> - titlebar.jsp
                    <window:float> - buttonfloat.jsp
                    <window:minimized> - togglebutton.jsp (I think)
                    <window:maximized> - togglebutton.jsp (I think)
                    <window:delete> - buttondelete.jsp
                  </window:titlebar>
                </portlet:portlet>
              </layout:placeholder>
            </layout:flowLayout>
          </page:page>
        /CONTENT
      </page:book>
      <application:footer /> - footer.jsp
    </application:body>
  </application:shell>
</application:desktop>