I have a use case to implement predefined pages for users. When they log in, they should see a page with a fixed set of gadgets. The users should not be able to modify the gadgets on the page.
When we started with the portal we only had 1 type of page that could contain gadgets: Page contained one or many Regions. A Region contained zero+ RegionWidgets which mapped to a specific Widget instance. Since then 2 new concepts have been introduced: the profile page and shared pages. I'm trying to understand how a Page is defined. Page has a pagetype. If the type is "User" then it appears as a tab in the main area. There seems to be an optional "ProfilePage" which has multiple "SubPage" pages that have the ProfilePage as its parent. Then there's a PageTemplate type which seems to be mapped to the "ProfilePage" and its "SubPage"'s. The PageType is an enum in the code base. Initially it was a table in the database, but that caused a catch-22 when you couldn't use the initial-data.sql script to start the portal (some services needed to do a lookup of the pagetype). This means that I cannot add my own page type for a "fixed" template. If a new widget should be added to a subpage, is that immediately available for all users or are all subpages individual instances? Another option would be to use a shared "User" page. The admin shares one of his pages with every user that matches a certain profile. We would then need to hide the option to unshare it. There are however several issues with the page sharing: - operations like delete, collapse, move or change preferences look possible, but eventually return an error message. - users that accept a shared page can add a new widget to the shared page that is immediately added for all users that have this page - users that accept a shared page share the same instance of a gadget. If the original page owner has done oauth to retrieve data, this data becomes available for all users of this shared page (which means my colleague can see my google contacts or appointments). The first two points can be solved easily by adding more checks. The last point is a conceptual issue. Was this intentional or not? So that leaves my question. What would be the way to make predefined pages that can be modified by an admin? Jasha Joachimsthal Europe - Amsterdam - Oosteinde 11, 1017 WT Amsterdam - +31(0)20 522 4466 US - Boston - 1 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02142 - +1 877 414 4776 (toll free) www.onehippo.com
