I've looked this over a bit more.
Regarding the big issues, yes I agree the tabs probably shouldn't be their own portal, if the aim of the navigation is that they should be pretty consistent no matter where the user is.
* My Workspace
* Courses
* Preferences
* Control Panel
Except for Courses, these are all standard OpenACS pages, which makes me think we should create similar page for Courses that either invokes or copies or shares the code that powers the Groups portlet (dotlrn-main-portlet.*).
To highlight the tabs, if we agree that the tabs should be at fixed URLs (not inside portals), then we should be able to compare the current URL against a the URL for each tab and highlight accordingly. Theses comparisons could be made cleanly, I'm pretty sure, e.g. relative the dotlrn instance URL for the Courses and Control Panel URLs, or by querying for the HomeURL kernel parameter for Preferences.
Another way is for the special pages to send the information back to the master template, either through attributes to the <master> tag or via globals. This would require changing at least one core page (/pvt/home). Might not be ideal.
Smaller stuff:
There's an install script for Oracle now.
Malte, I've committed over a few files based on what was in Jeremy's last tarball. These were notably different from CVS, even taking the navbar_list code into account, and looked better. The commits preserved the navbar_list code chunk in selva-master.tcl.
The tabs don't render well in IE.
The tabs don't resize well in Firefox/Windows.
The portlet headings (Groups, Forums, FAQs, etc) render inside the portlets, not outside, as they do on the sample page.