Contribution by the uPortal project to the JASIG newsletter for the September 2007 issue.
Since the previous newsletter, Eric Dalquist has generously taken on release engineering activities around a near-term uPortal 2.6.1 patch release, towards which an RC1 is already available on the uPortal downloads site. This release includes improvements to the improved portlet deployment utility contributed by Drew Wills and maintained in this patch via collaboration with Brad Johnson and others.
Progress towards a near-term, evolutionary uPortal 3 release continues, with Maven2ization (the first major architectural change identified in the roadmap) completed in an exploratory branch and ready for merge into the trunk, thanks primarily to the efforts of Eric Dalquist and Elliot Metsger.
Increasingly, uPortal developers are discussing and collaborating in an IRC chat room hosted by freenode. Connection information and logs are available in the wiki.