Just a quick update on our progress:
Today, I attempted to make the public portal available through a page that the user has permission to access, by passing in the community_id, per Caroline's suggestion. While I did manage to get the portal to show up, there were problems that I should have anticipated that makes this approach (alone) insufficient.
While the different portlets that are in the non-member portal do display just fine (including the community's public file storage folder), there is no way to get past the portal page to do anything useful. For example, clicking on a file in the public file storage folder to attempt a download will result in a security violation page. I should have realized that while the public has read privileges on the individual file object, they aren't allowed to communicate with the parent package that manages it. This permissions scheme will prevent this approach from working without some further (and I'm guessing serious) hacking.
I'm starting to feel like we're trying to put a square peg into a round hole. It might be time to just drill another hole and do public page outside the dotlrn framework. I do still hope we can find a solution that isn't that drastic.
Comments? Suggestions? We're eagerly listening.
Ben
