200702 February 2007 Newsletter Contribution

Efforts in uPortal 2 CVS "HEAD" are focused towards a near-term uPortal 2.6 release. This release is expected to be feature-complete and producing release candidates for quality assurance in early March. Yale University is poised to contribute exciting drag-and-drop user layout preferences features built on the popular Dojo ajax framework, targeted for inclusion in this release. This enhancement is the debut contribution of recently added committer, Jen Bourey. Paul Gazda, also recently added as a project committer, is to be thanked for addressing several groups management issues this week. Nick Nick (Deactivated) and Andrew Petro continue to merge Unicon's Academus uPortal enhancements into the codebase. Daniel McCallum, also of Unicon, has posted a proof-of-concept result of migrating uPortal CVS to SVN for community review. The prospect of this conversion was met with developer support and so it is likely this conversion will be completed soon, ideally in time for uPortal 2.6. Meanwhile, the uPortal users' mailing list has seen a surge in discussion and community mutual support in making use of the uPortal platform and Bart Grebowiec, a user experience designer at Rutgers, has been granted project committership to further project focus on user experience. Available uPortal developers are encouraged to gather in person (or via remote technologies) for the April 2007 developers' meeting.