200704 April 2007 Newsletter Contribution

Owned by Andrew Petro
Last updated: Jun 19, 2007 by Andrew Wills (Deactivated)Version comment
2 min read

The uPortal 2.6 release proceeds apace, with a 2.6.0 milestone 1 (with quickstart courtesy of Vincent Mathieu) available from the uPortal downloads page. uPortal 2.6 ships with drag and drop user preferences available for default theme. Jen Bourey of Yale University took point on making this happen and continues to merge in improvements derived from user experience testing. DLM (Distributed Layout Management, donated by SunGard Higher Education) is the default layout management approach. Mark Boyd was generous with his time and expertise in making this happen. uPortal 2.6 ships with a modern and beautiful default DLM-compatible structure transform / theme transform / skin derived from that of the highly successful MyRutgers uPortal project. Jason Shao was key to this effort. Tim Carroll has contributed a patch solving the infamous UP-1040 issue with JSR-168 portlet preferences in uPortal, with Eric Dalquist merging this into the shared codebase. Brad's Johnson's CSynFeedReader offers a new approach to including RSS and other syndicated feeds in uPortal. uPortal 2.6 standardizes on JDK 1.5 and support for JDK 1.6, moving uPortal to a more performant, more featureful development and runtime environment. Cris Holdorph took initiative in smoothing JDK 1.6 compatibility wrinkles. uPortal 2.6 includes many other enhancements, some of which derived from Unicon's Academus product and merged in by Unicon, with Nick Bolton doing most of the heavy lifting.

The uPortal developer meeting at Johns Hopkins University included discussion of uPortal 2.6 progress, recent contributions by Unicon to related open source, drag and drop in uPortal 2.6, out-of-the-box uPortal CAS integration and potential uPortal 2.7 vision, and facilities for the export and import of uPortal data, with approximately seventeen remote and in-person participants. Minutes from this meeting should soon be available from project secretary Michael Oltz.

Jason Shao prototyped a uPortal manual wiki space that grew during the developer meeting. The uPortal project seeks a uPortal Documentation Coordinator to help shepherd this and other documentation efforts.