Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Portlets, Includelets and bright ideas!

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Posted by Claudio Pasolini on
Hi Richard,

OpenACS 5.5 introduced the new layout-manager package and a layout-managed-subsite package based on the former.

The admin UI allows you to define the format of your pages and to place the includelets as you want.

There is a small number of includelets already available (calendar-includelet, content-includelet, file-storage-includelet, forums-includelet, lorsm-includelet, news-includelet and xowiki-includelet). Furthermore building your own includelets is really easy compared to the dotlrn way.

The packages are well documented and if you want to play with the existing includelets or build your own you should really give them a try.

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Posted by Richard Hamilton on
Claudio,

I have now installed the relevant packages and tried to set things up but have run into a few server errors and some confusion.

The function of Layout Manager is fairly self-explanitory.

The function of Layout-Subsite-Integration seems to be to provide a user interface to Layout-Manager. The first impression is that this provides all that is required.

However I now see that Layout-Managed-Subsites extends acs-subsite to make the whole thing work. Am I correct in assuming that all three are required? If so will the dependencies take care of the installation or must they be manually installed seperately?

Can you in fact use the layout-manager and layout-subsite-integration without using layout-managed-subsites? Is the order of installation important?

I have noticed that if you pre-install some includelets before installing layout-managed-subsites you end up with a failure of the postinstall script as it tries to install them again. I also couldn't delete the package (or unmount/delete in one operation) because the script somewhere calls db_flush which fails as an unknown call.

I also ran into trouble whilst running the wizard. After selecting the display options the wizard returned a 'no rows' failure - presumably because the includelets were installed before the application.

I will try again with an empty db and will install the layout manager first and report back! Hopefully I'll have more success.

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Posted by Don Baccus on
the includes should have package requires for their base application in every case, if you find one that doesn't, fix it please! (after posting so I can be properly embarrassed in public!)

the db_flush call should be fixed in 5.5.1 final (it's supposed to be db_flush_cache) ... hmmm maybe it didn't make it in before release.

No. It's on HEAD for 5.6.0, not 5.5.1.

You may want to edit that locally ...

I have noticed that if you pre-install some includelets before installing layout-managed-subsites you end up with a failure of the postinstall script as it tries to install them again.

Oh, wait ... I think this is due because the now-obsolete layout-subsite-integration package created the same three includelets (that map the standard acs-subsite application box + subsite box include scripts, and a third layout manager admin includelet) that layout-managed-subsite does.

As I explained in another post, layout-subsite-integration is obsolete now that we support package extension and should not be used.

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Posted by Richard Hamilton on
Don,

Thanks yes, I realised that the error was because I had installed the wrong package, but sorry, only after posting! :-|

R.