I have been using portal-fw for a year now. Overall, I’m very happy with it. It is well designed and contains all of the critical features you need to build a portal. It’s been lacking some of the nice to have's, but I’d rather have something to work with now and wait for the new features to come out. So I’ve been looking forward to the enhancements.
I have a few questions/wish list items (directed at Carsten): 1. Can you share with us the drivers for creating the new portal? - Why are you not extending the current portal-fw? - Is it going to be compatible with portal-fw? - What are the differences/new features in the new portal? 2. Layout I've noticed that you are changing the layout configuration, which is definitely a welcome change. The column layout worked fine, but was even behind WebLogic/WebSpere portals, which at least allow spanning columns. However, I find even the spanning design very limiting. I prefer to use CSS2 and take advantage of DIV tags, so that the coplets can be placed based on the absolute and relative positioning. For example, there is a place on my site where I would like the coplets to overlap, which is currently impossible. In general, I'd like to be able to leave "hooks" for the CSS classes. For example, I would like to be able to break down a page into areas. When a coplet is "DIVed" in such area, it is "styled" according to the area's rules. For example, all coplets in the "related-links" area have a light-gray background and "Helvetica" font (defined in a CSS stylesheet, but assigned by the portal config). A single coplet, however, should be able to override the style. 3. Application configuration I am probably "misusing" the portal, but in any case, this is what I do. I like to treat each page on the site as a portal page. Why? Well, I like to be very user-friendly, so that rather than letting the users customize the main page only, I want the to be able to do this on every page. Also, I’d like to have "site-editor" coplets on every page, which allow editing page content. Clearly, these coplets should only be available to the site editors. So, here is my problem. For a page to be a "portal" page, it needs to have an application configuration in the sitemap. So if I have 200 pages, I need to have 200 page configurations in my sitemap, which is unwieldy. It would be great to be able to do one of the two: - Make application configuration work with patterns, just like the rest of the sitemap - Allow this to be externalized from the sitemap into another configuration file By the way, at the moment adding a new application configuration requires to bounce Tomcat, which is bad (every time I add a page, I have to restart!) Thoughts? Cheers, -Alex --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
