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]
