Chuck Sev. is doing a demo of some of the new features that have been ported into Charon Portal in trunk. Additional hooks in Ian’s new portal Impl support multiple Velocity
### Features
* **Hierarchy** – sub sites, **NO INHERITED AUTHORIZATION**, velocity templated
* **Single Tool View** – edit Page order, and the toolbar/nav disappears so that you’re focused on only one tool — e.g. wiki, others. Also playing with using a iFrame tool, and point at another Sakai instance, inside the iFrame.
* **Display icons for tools**
* **iFrame-free View
* Size features detection
### ToDo:
* Federated
* OSP Convergence
* WSRP Producer
* Sakai-Portlets
* iFrame Replacements
* Nav
* Portable Portlets
* iFrame Replacement
* WebProxy
### Portal Implementation
Various API’s and influences provided for extension points — `RenderEngine`, `Providers` other pieces. Should support hot-loading from WAR/JAR files, or in the VTL. `PortalHandle` can be implemented to do URL handling and other pieces.
### OSP Portal
* Sites grouped by site type – e.g. courses, projects, semester? (IU)
* Tools in categories – collaboration/communication/admin? Also, the OSP portal changes allow things like contextual help/descriptions. I wonder if this might be an answer to our teaching pedagogy focused help — maybe the help becomes embedded in the tool selection screen.
* Tools hidden based on permissions – site-editor hiding usage scenario
* Breadcrumbs –
* Category screen w/XHTML templates
* Portable rendering skin-able by XSLT
Plans to bring the portal forks (Velocity, OSP, etc) back together… using Ian’s pluggable extensions points — targeted for 2. 5
One concern I would have about the variety of portal “skins” using different templating engines is that it seems likely to produce forking in terms of CSS and designs, making it harder to share design elements across sites.