Community

Contributions

We encourage a bottom-up approach to scheduling and prioritizing, focusing community resources and collaboration. Natural prioritization ensures the framework advances as members allocate resources (developer time, paid consulting, local expertise, or others) to address local needs. This has the advantage of members prioritizing work according to local needs, aligning community resources with the needs of our individual members. We seek to provide a focus for planning, coordinating, resource gathering, and tracking this progress. We encourage:

How Can I Participate?

I need uPortal to do X:

• Participation - the uPortal development community has begun collecting requirements to drive the featureset of future releases of the uPortal framework. These requirement documents will serve as the basis for strategic planning and influence future development.
• Log JIRA Issues - JIRA is our issue tracking system and can be used to document bugs, tasks, or improvements to the uPortal framework. JIRA issues are the way to document modifications as well as enable issue reporters to communicate with implementors if you are not the individual actually implementing the change. All uPortal changes should have an associated JIRA issue. The JIRA issue should contain a description of the problem/use-case, and information such as versions(s) affected, version patched, a brief overview of the approach taken in the patch, and how to test the patch.
• Contribute Development - Most uPortal development is community driven - features are implemented by individual institutions to address their needs and contributed into uPortal CVS. Deployers with developer time and familiarity with J2EE and XSL/XML can make inquiries on the JASIG-DEV mailing list with questions or for recommended approaches to implement modiciations and enhancements to the uPortal framework.
• Employ Consulting - The uPortal community has a number of commercial partners familiar with the capabilities and codebase who can be contracted for specific enhancements or modifications. A number of features were originally developed under contract and later contributed into the general framework distribution.

I've done X, how can I get it into uPortal?

• Submit Patches - patches can be attached to issues logged into JIRA (see above). After the patch has been posted an announcement should be sent to the JASIG-DEV mailing list asking for review and for someone to apply the patch to uPortal CVS.
• Contribute Features - you may have a locally implemented feature which is too large/complex to include a meaningful patch. The recommended approach is to write up a summary of your goals and proposed modification and post it to the JASIG-DEV mailing list for discussion and review. A release engineer can then coordinate with you regarding scheduling your modification for inclusion in a particular uPortal release.
• Write Documentation - Recipes of modifications or approaches, particularly for integrating with specific systems or producing specific behavior are extremely valuable, and always welcome and should be added directly to the uPortal Wiki. Users can create an account and should add a page linked to the appropriate section. An announcement to JASIG-PORTAL is likely appropriate to share with the community.

I would like to work with others to accomplish X:

• Channel/Portlet Development - JA-SIG can provide shared CVS, issue tracking, wiki space & mailing list hosting for channel and portlet development. Collaboratively developed channels are also available/can be shared in the JA-SIG Clearinghouse.

How can I help uPortal to the next level?

• Write Code - JIRA contains a number of features not currently implemented in uPortal. If you would like to contribute to uPortal it's a good place to look for possible work items.
• Write Test Cases - Automated JUnit tests are provided for (an increasing) number of uPortal framework features. They are useful for detecting regressions and providing confirmation that existing and future code implements requirements in the expected manner.
• Write Documentation - the documentation for the uPortal framework can always be improved.
• Answer User Questions - andwering questions on the JASIG-PORTAL list is invaluable in aiding new implementors and directing people to existing resources

Community

People

uPortal Resources

• JA-SIG PORTAL - mailing list for uPortal users, deployers, channel & portlet developers
• JA-SIG DEV - mailing list for uPortal framework development
• Wiki - Documentation on architecture, configuration, deployment and other topics related to the uPortal Framework can be found in the wiki
• Issue Tracker - Tasks, Bugs, Enhancements, and New Features are described and tracked in our issue tracking system
• CVS Repositoy - JA-SIG maintains a public CVS server which is used to store source code and enable collaborative development.
  webview | checkout | developer access
• JA-SIG Clearinghouse - A selection of community contributions to uPortal, particular channels and portlets implementing features like elections, announcements, webmail, etc.
• uPortal Deployers - A listing of production uPortal deployments

Commercial Partners

• Unicon
• IMM
• Sunguard HE

General Portal Resources

• Portal Group
• Other resources

Meetings/Conferences

Recent

• Spring 2006 Dev Meeting

Upcoming

• Summer JA-SIG Conferences
• Fall Dev Meeting
• Winter JA-SIG Conferences