200707 July 2007 uPortal Newsletter Contributions

Since the previous newsletter, the uPortal 2.6 release process has continued, delivering release candidates one and two of the prospective 2.6.0 release, also available for download from the uPortal downloads page. Release candidates have included 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.

Also since the previous newsletter, the uPortal project has addressed a critical security vulnerability in RemoteUserSecurityContext by releasing a security patch release uPortal 2.5.3.1, thanks especially to the work of Eric Dalquist of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and of Bill Thompson, JA-SIG board member and uPortal project liaison.

At the Denver JA-SIG conference, there were a number of presentations about and related to uPortal, including pre-conference seminars on DLM and on implementing uPortal, and presentations on Duke University's revitalized uPortal 2.5.3 deployment, uPortal 2.6 release, comparing IChannel and JSR-168, web proxies, use of AJAX to improve the uPortal user experience, compelling news aggregation, Pearson Publishing's large-scale uPortal project, DLM, and Shibbolized uPortal.

Several conference presentations related to the FLUID project, which will be working with uPortal in the near term to improve user experience and adopt more compelling user interface components. It is not too early to get involved in these exciting efforts.

At the conference, Matt Young of Duke University announced the availability of JSR-168 portlets from the Duke uPortal project as open source portlets, including a Facebook integration portlet, an email portlet, and a tabbed RSS consumption portlet. This was just one (particularly well-presented) example of interesting higher-ed-developed JSR-168 portlets shown and discussed at JA-SIG Denver.