Internal vs. External
Internal CMS
The simplest CMS integration might involve embedding a JCR store into the portal and providing a simple WYSIWYG portlet for editing operations.
Jasig already has an incubating simple WYSIWYG CMS portlet which is capable of interacting with a JSR-170 content repository such as Jackrabbit. The simplest CMS integration might be to embed a JCR store into the portal, and then use this portlet as the front-end for editing operations.
This approach might be particularly compelling when combined with the delegated portlet management capabilities present in uPortal 3.2 and above. uPortal's new portlet management tools allow sufficiently-privileged users to create new portlets, then walk them through a content approval/publishing/expiration workflow. Permissions for each step may be delegated to groups of users by portlet category. Combined with a simple WYSIWYG portlet, these new management capabilities could provide powerful workflow control of content creation and editing that might meet the needs of most institutions.
In the approach described above, Jasig would likely clean up the existing portlet and modify it to present the current editing interface as the CONFIG mode. Jasig would also need to integrate a JCR store into uPortal and address import/export needs for the portlet.
External CMS
Contents are managed by an independant application (the web CMS).
External integration could assume that the web-CMS supports CMIS (or proprietary similar) protocol able to browse sitemap or content repository.
Portlet 1
Portlet 2
A Contributer/administrator would add content in uPortal then select a Portlet dedicated to CMS content.
Then a widget should appear (preferably during the "add content" process) displaying one or many sitemap of external CMS. This widget would use CMIS requests to browse remote Web-CMS pages. Apache Chemistry project provides Java implementations of CMIS and may be used to develop such a widget.
Known Web-CMS/uPortal integrations
One known Drupal-uPortal integration uses Drupal to both create and manage content that will later be displayed in uPortal. A custom portlet demonstrated at the 2009 Jasig Unconferenceallows portal administrators to browse and select Drupal content from the portal. In this system, Drupal content is offered to the portal in XML format.
Another Ametys-uPortal integration has more or less the same approach. Ametys is used to create and manage content, and a XML-XSLT portlet is used to display content to uPortal user. Ametys content is offered to the portal in XML-Docbook format.
External CMS Case Studies
- UCI
CMS in other portals
Liferay includes an internal CMS which offers workflow capabilities, as well as some structure/template features somewhat reminiscent of Jasig's HyperContent project. Liferay's implementation also offers the ability to push content from a development environment to a production server via a administrative user interface that makes use of web service calls.