Forum OpenACS Q&A: New portal package demo is available ...

Several people have expressed interest in the progress being made on the portal rewrite.

Check out donbaccus.com.  The main subsite and two subsites mounted under it are all portal driven and show a couple of the navigation, theme and layout possibilites.

Navigation isn't perfect thus far ... and a couple of the portlets (file-storage/calendar) need work to be made fully compatible with the rewrite (Dave's fixing some file-storage problems, the calendar portlet needs to lose its assumptions about where the calendar package is mounted).

The portal package is in contrib/packages/portal.

Working portlets can be downloaded from donbaccus.com (click on the "download" tab).

Feel free to play with them and let me know what you think.  In particular feedback on the portal configuration tool is welcome.

None of this is complete but I think the possibilities are intriguing ...

This version in contrib/packages/portal works ONLY with OpenACS.  I've been using it on HEAD ... it would probably work on 5.1, too, but there's going to be a bit of a conflict because of Timo's changes to move package_id into acs_objects.

Hmmm...then again upgrade scripts will be easy enough.

It only works under Postgres at the moment, though moving it to Oracle will be easy, just minor datamodel and PL/SQL changes (I don't have Oracle available locally at the moment or I would've done it right off).

I plan to start reintegrating this with .LRN when I get back from my photo and Utah State Open Source Conference (meeting Roberto Mello) on or about April 11th.

There's a bunch of other stuff that needs doing ... internationalization (not worth it until the admin UI settles down), documentation, more and better portlets, etc.

Better integration with acs-subsite, too, but that's longer term and depends on other design decisions regarding navigation and the like.

The portal package configuration tool is, indeed, only available to admins.  Because it affects everybody.  That's the way it should be.

At the moment I've not supplied a "My Account" or "Configuration" portlet for users.  But the code's there, it's just missing links.  If you know your portal_id you can visit the portal-configuration page ... just say "?portal_id=[your portal id]".

This will come.  Thus far I've been mostly interested in structure, cleaning it up.