---
title: Developing the administration using Portal Engine
---

> Agent instructions:
> **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown.
>
> - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version.
> - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt).

Portal Engine allows you to create custom administration interface pages without any programming. With Portal Engine, you do not need to use Visual Studio or any other web development tool. Instead, you create reusable templates directly in your web browser.

The basic components used during Portal Engine development are page templates, which can be used for:

- Administration interface pages ([UI elements](https://docs.kentico.com/13/custom-development/creating-custom-modules/reference-managing-ui-elements.md))
- The administration's [widget dashboards](https://docs.kentico.com/13/custom-development/extending-the-administration-interface/setting-up-widget-dashboards.md)

Page templates consist of a layout and instances of web parts. The **page layout** determines the structure of each page template, and can be defined either through full ASCX markup or standard HTML code. The code allows you to set up any layout that you require. Portal Engine page layouts contain special markup tags that define **web part zones** – areas where developers place web parts. Each web part zone can contain any number of web part instances.

**Web parts** are components that display some type of content or provide background functionality. From a technical point of view, web parts are standard [ASP.NET user controls](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/aspnet/y6wb1a0e\(v=vs.100\)) with an interface for configuring properties.

The following figures show the components of a sample page template – the page layout, web part zones and web parts.

### Template page layout

The following image shows the layout code of a page template for one of the administration's dashboards. The code contains a _CMSWebPartZone_ tags representing web part zone.

![Code of a page layout with web part zones](https://docs.kentico.com/docsassets/13/developing-the-administration-using-portal-engine/Page_Layout_Code.png "Code of a page layout with web part zones")

### Template Design tab

The following image shows the template in **Design** mode, with individual instances of web parts placed in the zones.

![Viewing the template on the Design tab](https://docs.kentico.com/docsassets/13/developing-the-administration-using-portal-engine/Design_Mode.png "Viewing the template on the Design tab")