- Introduction
- Creating the Portlet
- Customizing home page
- Customizing Self-Service page

# Introduction

A "portlet" is a component used to extend your RT instance, specifically the "RT-at-a-glance" home and Self-Service pages. For instance, the "n Highest Priority Tickets I own", "Quick Ticket Creation" and "Queue List" panels on the default homepage are portlets.

# Creating the Portlet

There are at least two things you have to do to create a portlet:

Create the template

  Create a Mason template in `/usr/local/share/request-tracker5/html/Elements` that defines your portlet's behaviour.

Set `$HomepageComponents` config

  Enable your portlet by adding its name to the `$HomepageComponents` configuration variable in RT_SiteConfig.pm.

Once you have created and installed your portlet, you will need to restart the webserver.

# Customizing home page

When you click on the "Edit" link at your home page (or go there via your preferences), you can select which of the available portlets are displayed in the "body" (left) or "summary" (right) columns of the home page.

# Customizing Self-Service page

They can also appear on the Self-Service interface, but have to be hard-coded, because Self-Service users don't have the same preferences available to them. You will have to create your element in `/usr/local/share/request-tracker5/html/SelfService/Elements`, then extend the SelfService interface to call it. Copy `/usr/share/request-tracker5/html/SelfService/index.html` to `/usr/local/share/request-tracker5/html/SelfService/index.html`, then edit it to add:

        <& /SelfService/Elements/MyPortlet &>

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