hmm, not sure, i understood you correctly. If you want a dotlrn portlet, which lists e.g. the most recent open items/task/... with a short description, i would recommend the following:
a) create a new category tree "state of work" with e.g. categories "open", "under work", "done" and map it to the xowiki of the community.
b) create an xowiki page for e.g. the open items (en:open) with a content like
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{{weblog-portlet -category_id 4305 -summary 1 -decoration plain}}
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where the category_id is the one for the open items (find the category_id e.g. via "en:weblog", by clicking on the categories)
c) add the xowiki page "en:open" as portlet from the admin-page of the community
If you create some pages with an description, categorized with "open", you will get the listing with the description in the page en:open (since "-summary 1" is used above).
In case, you want to change the layout of the summary, edit en:weblog-portlet (or rename it) and change the WeblogRenderer (responsible for rendering the full listing) and/or the EntryRenderer (responsible for rendering a single entry). Most likely it is sufficient to remove some of the markup. If you rename e.g. en:weblog-portlet to en:listing, don't forget to change the name as well in (b) above.
Does this help?
-gustaf neumann
PS: i have just updated the weblog-portlet to accept the category_id from the includelet call. If you have a fairly recent installation, you should be able to make the following change to packages/xowiki/www/prototypes/weblog-portlet.page
http://cvs.openacs.org/cvs/openacs-4/packages/xowiki/www/prototypes/weblog-portlet.page?r1=1.12&r2=1.13
