Favorites is an in-development, one might say kind of radical feature.  It is being developed out loud and in public (mostly) on feature branches.  Adopters of uPortal 4.1 / Respondr will not be required to use this feature.

This feature is being developed (primarily?) by UW-Madison for use in the redesigned UW-Madison portal.

Favorites is a different way of interacting with layout.

Instead of (or in addition to) thinking about tabs and organization of portlets within columns on tabs (a dashboard-centric view), favorites thinks about favoriting individual portlets and collections of portlets (a one-portlet-at-a-time-maximized-centric view).

Instead of (or in addition to) adding portlets to one's layout, with Favorites, users add a portlet to their favorites.

Talk is cheap, where's the code?

Feature branch for favorites portlet: https://github.com/Jasig/uPortal/tree/UP-3896

Some features have come into this branch via pull requests, vis:

 * un-favoriting: https://github.com/Jasig/uPortal/pull/203

Got mockups / screenshots?

Design

Where are favorites stored?

Individually favorited portlets are stored in a DLM fragment folder of type="favorites".  Since it's a goofy non-regular type, it won't be rendered in traditional spots in the layout (it's not a tab).

Favorited collections (currently) are DLM fragment tab-level folders of type="favorite_collection".  Since this too is a goofy non-regular type, it won't be rendered in traditional spots in the layout (it's not a tab).

Thoughts: Possibly Favorites should be able to consider regular old layout tabs (type="regular") as favorited collections.  Possibly this should be a portlet preference allowing both approaches.  Which you'd want probably depends on whether you're trying to use Favorites instead of or along side of traditional tabs, whether and what layouts you're carrying forward from prior uPortal versions in your implementation, whether you're trying to offer respondr alongside of or instead of universality.  Anyway, Favorites doesn't do any of that yet – currently it's hard-coded to consider tabs of type="favorite_collection" as collections of favorites.

Viewing

VIEW mode UI lists favorites.  Users can click favorited portlets to launch that portlet by fname with MAXIMIZED window state. Users can click Collections of favorites view those collections as if they were focused-upon tab in the layout.

Editing

Edit UI lists all favorites, collections first then portlets.

Items with deleteAllowed=true (DLM) are hyperlinks to ActionUrls deleting the node.  Trash glyph.

Items with deleteAllowed=false (DLM) are not hyperlinks and have tool tips explaining they are not deleteable.  Lock glyph.

Edit controller checks if signaled nodeId is deletable.  Adds errorMessage render parameter if needed.  Adds successMessage render parameter if success.

Who's interested in adopting / working on this?

Tentatively interested parties: the Wisconsin crew (Jim Helwig, Tim Levett, Andrew Petro, Timothy Vertein), Aaron Grant / Oakland, Anthony Colebourne / Manchester; Unicon (Andrew Wills (Deactivated), James Wennmacher (Deactivated), etc.) on behalf of clients