The portal is assembled and edited by an agent, and the easiest way to talk to it is in plain words. For that the portal has a chat: you describe what needs doing, and the agent gets to work. The chat opens as a side panel — by the New Chat button in the header. If a portal page is open at that moment, the input field is pre-filled with which page is meant, and all that is left is to write what to change. The chat connects to an external Xedant Agent — the same one you use for other tasks.
Connecting
The chat works when your Xedant Agent’s address and access key are set for the portal (these values are set in the product’s settings). When they are not set, the chat panel and the edit buttons simply do not appear — the portal does not show buttons that lead nowhere. Details are in the Agent Management section.
What the agent can do
- Create a page — assemble a new page from blocks, following your description in words.
- Rework a page — change the text, the order of blocks, the look and the access.
- Fix a single block — swap the picture, update the table, add a button.
- Write or repair a script — build the calculation for live numbers and debug it when something did not work.
Edits right from the page
You do not have to start from the chat: an edit can be requested right from the page you are viewing. Next to the page title and on every block — on hover — there is an Edit with agent button. It opens the chat panel and fills the input box with which page or block is meant — nothing is sent until you finish writing what should change. For a page the request concerns the whole page; for a block, only the selected block.
The portal adds the needed context to the request by itself: the portal page’s path and the block marker. Thanks to that the agent understands exactly which page is meant and does not ask again.
Remarks right on the page
There is another way to ask for an edit — right on the page. Select the fragment that is not right, and an input box with the same capabilities as the chat panel appears at the bottom. From there there are two paths: leave a remark with the Comment button, or send the task straight away with the Send button — the portal then opens a separate conversation with the agent, and both the selected text and your instruction go into it. In both cases there is no need to explain in words where the problem is — the remark remembers the selected text itself, and the agent fixes exactly that place. A remark it has handled it removes: the comment thread works as a queue to work through, not as a log (see the Page Comments section).
Fixing problems
When a page or a block is broken, a Fix with agent button sits next to the problem message. A click sends the agent the problem’s description and the page’s context, and it gets to the repair. You do not need to work out the causes — pressing the button and describing what you wanted to see is enough.
The recommendation
Sometimes the agent leaves one unobtrusive Recommendation card on a page — what would be useful to add or fix, and why. It is not an error but a hint. The card can be hidden with the ✕ button: as long as the page is untouched, it will not come back. As soon as the agent changes the page again, the recommendation may return — the material has been updated, after all.
How the work goes
While the agent is busy, the chat panel shows Agent is working…. When a task needs clarifying, the agent asks questions — answered with cards right in the conversation. The whole conversation history is kept, so past tasks can be revisited and continued. When the edit is ready, the page updates on screen by itself. An answer is announced by a sound: the event is marked and plays once even with several portal tabs open, and a muted tab does not steal it.
A new chat already opens with the portal management skill portal-manager selected — a ready-made guide to running the portal, so the agent knows from the first message how pages, blocks and portal rules are put together and does not spend time on explanations. As soon as you pick another skill or “no skill”, that choice is remembered and applies to the following new chats.
Committing the agent’s work
The agent keeps its edits in the repository’s working folder — like a draft before it is written into the history. While that folder holds uncommitted changes, a pair of buttons appears in the portal’s header: Commit writes the agent’s work into the version history, and Undo asks first and then irreversibly reverts every uncommitted change. That way a successful edit can be pinned with one button and an unlucky one cancelled — before it ever reaches the history.
License
Sending messages to the agent requires a valid license — that is the only thing it restricts. Everything else works without one: the page tree, viewing, blocks, calculation scripts, forms and the public site. When a license has expired, trying to send the agent a message opens a dialog offering to upgrade it. Details are on the Agent Factory page.
Next: what exactly gets checked on a page — in the Page Validation section; how the agent edits the portal’s content — in Agent Management; a general introduction — in Getting Started.