Forum OpenACS Q&A: Copenhagen - New Portal

Collapse
1: Copenhagen - New Portal
Posted by Michael Hinds on 04/11/03 01:25 PM
Just finished our chat about the new portal package, and a few useful suggestions came out.

First of all, I've been looking at the code left by OpenForce trying to figure out how much work is left to do. I've got as far as doing a successful install of the package, and can access the main admin screen, but after that it breaks. I'm not totally familiar with the datamodel, so I've been looking at the dotLRN portal. I have some understanding of this, but I could use a little more help, which Don has agreed to provide. The plan is:

  • I will provide a summary of differences between dotLRN portal and the current new portal
  • Don will advise as to how this all works! Using this information I will be able to write a test portlet and use this to test the functionality of new portal, and bring the functionality up to the level of dotLRN portal
  • I'm only working in Oracle, so if anyone wants to volunteer to do the Postgres side, please do
Once this is done we'll be at a stage where we can improve the package. A few ideas are:
  • Ability to author different portal types as in dotLRN (this is not currently a feature of new portal)
  • Alter look and feel of whole portal page. Currently only the theme is customisable.
  • Rocael has a theme editor, which would be nice!
Collapse
2: Re: Copenhagen - New Portal (response to 1)
Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 04/12/03 02:50 PM
Why do we need new-portal as well/instead of the dotLRN portal?
Collapse
3: Re: Copenhagen - New Portal (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Hinds on 04/14/03 12:47 PM
.LRN portal isn't compatible with OpenACS. OpenForce started a port, cleaning up the Tcl by way of splitting procs into namespaces and such, but there were also datamodel changes. I'm going to outline the changes that were made, and the plan is for Don to give me a hand working out where we're at because he's pretty familiar with .LRN portal.
Collapse
4: Re: Copenhagen - New Portal (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 04/14/03 03:55 PM
The above isn't *quite* accurate as we could extend the existing dotLRN new-portal package with the additional features needed to use it standalone.

But the partial rewrite of the dotLRN new-portal package is a better place to start because Open Force did indeed make significant steps in creating a lighter weight datamodel, cleaning up the Tcl library code, etc.  The goal is to write the necessary upgrade scripts so that existing dotLRN installs can use the cleaned-up version.  It isn't the intent that there be two portal modules, one for OpenACS and one for dotLRN, but rather than both be the cleaned-up version.

Collapse
5: Re: Copenhagen - New Portal (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Hinds on 04/14/03 11:09 PM
Actually I'm glad this came up because it occurred to me after the discussion. So the plan is to effectively upgrade the dotLRN portal in such a way that it is compatible with both dotLRN and OpenACS. Don't worry Don, I created ERDs for the 2 systems today and will be getting back to you presently in due course most imminently :)