Caroline,
Thanks a lot for posting this history and your thoughts. Please let's keep this flow of ideas coming through.
Re: Public portals, they have worked fine in our tests, but I haven't found the usual UI for editing the portal and adding new portlets. We've added portlets to it via Tcl or PL/pgSQL. The problem is as you describe: we had to give dotlrn_user read permissions on the whole community for a non-member to be able to view the non-member portal. But as a consequence s/he could see everything else in the community, which is not what we want.
I like your idea of passing the community_id up to be displayed by the portal of the community the user belongs to. I'll explore that.
Hmm, the feature you were trying to get working would be a really nice one to have indeed. Perhaps it can come out as a by-product of this discussion.
Thanks again.
-Roberto
