JBossDeveloper

It will be nice if there is a feature in the management portlet that can force the portal to re-read all the portlet configurations. Right now if there is a new deployment, I have to configure all the changes manually even though the configuration files have the correct information. I have to do it again for every environment (test, stage, production). We have 5 pages, and each has 4-9 portlets. It can be a lot of work and is prone to human errors.

If I want the portal to read the configurations, I have to deploy the portal/portlets with <if-exists>overwrite</if-exists>, then deploy it again with <if-exists>keep</if-exists>. This is not worth the effort to do so.

One recommendation is please have internationalization in mind when you design the UI. I see that the edit icon on portlet title bar is replaced by word. This may have impact for users that do not understand English. I would prefer an image icon, with popup message (internationalize if possible). In this case even if internationalization of the popup message is not done, at least the user can guess what it means from the image icon.

I'm currently a newbe to the Jboss portal code and have been evaluating the bundled 2.4 CR-3 code base. I reviewed the mockups and wow, you guys are on the right track! When did you say your targeting the release of 2.6?

In the mockup's, I couldn't tell if you are able to order the pages. This would be a great feature.

Also, I noticed that you can "hide" pages based upon a users role, however this doesn't seem to be true at the portlet (window) leave. I would like to "hide" a window on a page, based upon the users role. Case in point, I added a portlet "Hello World" to the default page which has the role "unchecked" with permission of view. I changed the portlet "Hello World" role to "user" with permission of view, however, when I bring up the page, the window "Hello World" is still being displayed. But yet, I had not logged in, much less logged in as "user". Is this the way it was desgined to work or is this a bug?

thanks for the feedback.

You can hide a window by securing the portlet instance.

Thanks for the pointer on changing the security on the portlet istnace. That almost works. However, I now get a message "Access Denied". Is there a why to just hide the window without the error message?

Just one last note on sorting the pages. It would be nice if we could set the sort order by the user role. So the navigation tabs sort order would look something like this:

<01-unckecked> <02-user> <03-user> <04-superUser> <05-admin>

"roy.russo@jboss.com" wrote:

"Frozen4Time" wrote:

Google, actually had something like this (drag-n-drop wysiwyg layout builder) in their first versions of their portal. For some reason, I can't find it anymore, but it was a killer feature.

Try http://www.google.com/ig you might have to log in. Click on a portlet to move with a drag and drop.

Google's wysiwyg is way cool.

The column layouts are great and used in many portals. Some implementations that I recall also had the concept of 'wide' and 'narrow' column widths and allowing a portlet to pre-define itself as a 'wide' portlet or a 'narrow' portlet to coincide with the layout.

By allowing the layout identifers like column width and allowing portlet designers to pre-define the expected size/scale of their portlet will allow users to auto-render their own page much quicker, simpler, and more effectively (with probably better results).

I would even borrow from some of the desktop UI's the 'docklet' idea of small, square portlets with just minimal graphical or textual information (i.e. CPU usage, mem, have-new-mail, network latency, etc).

So, to summarize: Column width identifers for layout managers and allowing portlet designers to pre-define their portlet's intended width.

---narrow--- ------wide------- -docklet-

First of all: the layout mockups posted by you guys are awesome. Cannot wait to see "jboss portal 2.6 released today" flickering across some news ticker

It would be a nice feature if it was possible to define page layouts that go beyond the classical column based layouts. I imagine to have a page layout designer whose widgets resemble java layout manager. E.g flow layout but especially a border layout and absolute layouts which stay an an absolute screen position.
Each region of a layout manager can be assigned a name and then the complete layout template could be saved.
Then, to wire portlet instances to a page layout, they only would have to be assigned a region name.
I know that the wiring by region-name is already present but don't know whether what I have described above would be possible.
Especiially, a page layout designer UI would be breathtaking because I would like to see that portal frameworks go beyond the classical choices of two column or three column layouts.

What I'd like to be able to do is for example to have a column layout at the center of the page.
At the top I'd reserve two regions for a drop down navigation menu and tabs. At the bottom I would maybe like to have an absolute region which doesn't move with vertiical scrolls into which I could add a task-bar, for example using the Tomahawk Fsheye navigation menu.
It would be cool to show people that JBoss portal goes beyond the classical portal metaphors.

With this in mind I think that I would rather not use a dhtml foldout for layout selection but rather to grant a full page region to this dialog. The complexity of such a dialog can expand and a foldout might start to look a little overloaded in the end, if people start adding their own customized layout schemes.

If the layout column widths are to be CSS-driven/themed, that sounds fine.

If there is a list of 20 portlets for a user to select, will they be able to see/understand the preferred-width size of the portlets so that user can choose the best column to add the portlet to?

-D

I agree with the above post that being able to order the navigation tabs is a very useful addition. Actually I think it is almost essential.