NOTE: THIS IS A DRAFT REFERENCING NEWS THAT HAS NOT YET HAPPENED.
Since the previous newsletter, uPortal made publicly available released the much-awaited general-audience uPortal 2.6 release, after first delivering a third release candidate, both .0, available for download from the uPortal downloads page. This GA release includes continued enhancements and corrections to the new drag and drop user preferences available for default theme, thanks to the continued work of Jen Bourey of Yale University, and to JSR-168 support, thanks to the efforts of Eric Dalquist (UW-Madison). Special thanks are due to Eric Dalquist for cutting a decisive swath through remaining nagging issues, making way for this release.
The uPortal project especially acknowledges the efforts of Nick Bolton (Unicon) and Susan Bramhall (Yale) in helping the project to address recent issues raised.
uPortal is pleased to welcome a number of several new committers this month, including Andy Gherna, Lennard Fuller (Unicon), and Timothy Carroll: Timothy Carroll and Andy Gherna of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Lennard Fuller of Unicon, Inc.. Timothy and Andy have been involved in uPortal for quite some time, submitting issues, patches, and recently applying heavy lifting on improving JSR-168 support in uPortal. Lennard has spoken at prior JA-SIG conferences on a variety of topics, most recently on topics related to his ongoing work with Pearson Education's uPortal project. Adding Lennard as a project committer is hoped to help uPortal to better avail itself of the opportunities for improvement unearthed by Pearson's very-high-load project.
At the direction of the JA-SIG Board of Directors, the uPortal project is instituting a project steering committee. Members of this committee are appointed by the Board, elected by the JA-SIG membership, or elected by the uPortal developers. While the election is not yet complete, there appears to be clear consensus among the uPortal developers to select Eric Dalquist (UW-Madison) and Andrew Petro (Unicon) to represent uPortal developers on the committee.
These new committers and steering committee are coming on board at an especially exciting time for uPortal: with the release of uPortal 2.6.0 and creation of a 2-6-patches maintenance branch, uPortal HEAD will be progressing towards a near-term, continued-evolution, yet aggressively enhanced release, delivering on the uPortal 3 premise, as discussed at the Denver uPortal developer lunch and Bar Camp, on the uPortal developer email list, and recently on the uPortal discussion email list. Much progress is already available in an exploration branch on the first technology deliverable on the roadmap, a Maven 2 uPortal build process.
- Andrew Petro
uPortal 2.6 release engineer
et. al.