Here are my experiences with the jetspeed psml management system. I've had to change a couple things in ways which somebody else might find useful (please let me know if so!) Also, I am discovering that I may have a (hopefully reconcilable) philosophical problem with PSML.
Before I begin, our portal (still in development stage) can be seen at http://nurse.ri.seawave.com:8180/portal/portal You can log in using "testcrew/password". We don't plan on letting our users customize their portal pages at all in terms of the layout, presence or absence of certain portlets. However, we need to give them ways to customize attributes of their existing portlets. We also need to service more than one TYPE of user, each with a different pre-defined set of panes and portlets. Correct me if I'm wrong, but we can't use role-based PSML because that would prevent the use of individual settings.... any change to a portlet attribute would then be seen by ALL other users in the same role. Also, there is no single user from whom psml files for new users could be copied, because that wouldn't allow for different layouts for different types of users. So I changed JetspeedSecurity to point to my own UserManagement class, and overrode the addDefaultPSML() method to make a copy of the psml associated with the user's role rather than the psml of another user (like turbine). Not a huge deal, but now I am arriving at what seems to be a bigger problem: Although the psml file of a user will differ from those of his/her peers only in very narrowly defined ways (only in the manipulation of attributes for portlets), each user still has a separate copy of the file. This means that as we add new functionality to our portal, adding new portlets and presumably moving the existing ones around somewhat, ONLY new users will benefit from these changes. Everytime we want to add a new portlet, we'll have to write a script that will iterate through everyone's psml and manipulate the xml in a certain way, adding entries for the new portlet.... the exact type of thing that was supposed to be short-circuited by the Customizer. Presumably this will have to be done when the server is shut down, because otherwise the psml files of any currently-logged-in users will be overwritten back to their old state when a they log out. Aren't the notions of CONTENT and SETTINGS separable? Shouldn't this information be stored in 2 separate files? Did I miss some way that the current psml system can allow for this? If not, how much work would have to be done to allow for this? I would certainly be willing to adopt such a project rather than resorting to the "mass update script" strategy mentioned above... - Matthew Forsyth Seawave.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
