The portals package is being heavily rewritten as part of the dotLRN project. It's great that Vinod and others are hacking in fixes to the existing portal package but beyond getting it up, running, and minimally usable we probably shouldn't put much energy into it. It's somewhat brain-damaged as I think folks are figuring out.
The new portals package will make use of the new site contract paradigm to define the relationship between the portal "window manager" and the elements it can display. Should be much more flexible and "portlets" should be usable in a wider set of contexts, too.
Beyond that I just know that Ben et al are very busy and other than a couple of e-mails discussing design I'm out of the loop. They're located in NYC so lost a couple of weeks of productivity in September, which means they're tight up against deadlines so have been working less openly (without much feedback, in other words) than would be true if September hadn't been such a freaky month.
