Portlets are dynamic content units, used in corporate, educational and personalization-aware portals, that allow its users a unique and self-made experience of a visit or work session. Usually displayed within graphical containers (generally boxes), portles can be used throughout any portal or enterprise intranet and also packaged and delivered remotely through different standard protocols. The most noticeable use of these are those MySomething pages, because its object condition allows them to be arranged in different ways within a same page ( a.k.a. site personalization. ).

Current features

CMFPortlets is a work in progress. In its current form is a layouting engine made out of skins for the current CMF (no hard-wires yet) that enable the display and layout configuration of portlets in pages. CMFPortlets currently allows:

• Creation of inbound portlets by any member, and inbound and external by managers, using existing syndication products and standard portal types.
• To add, delete, rename and set the size properties of any number of published portlets pages (a.k.a. "workspaces"), independently of the user folder existence and the file system.
• To add, delete and set the width of any number of columns per page
• To add, delete and select the box skin of any number of portlets per column.(Box skins created by managers)
• Interactive layout based on Dan George's Option Chooser 1.0 and DynAPI 2.5.6, that enables the selection and switching of portlet boxes by drag and drop.

Sample basic portlets features:

• Porlets settings showing properties defined by managers (as public or restricted, changeable only by managers)
• Default portlet properties allowing to show any portlet content, either embedded in a box (normal) or in an iframe window.
• External content viewable trough iframes using any already deployed portlet.
• Configurable Folder viewer (displays the contents of any folder)
• Sample RSS feed. (Needs EIONET's RDFSummary installed)
• Interactive RGB color selector (IE only).
• "My Stuff" and "Readme" portlets.

Desired features (some of them in the works)

• Adding of page rows. (not started)
• Seamless integration to syndication products, according to standards.(not started)
• UI for easy creation of themes for boxes and tabs (for managers). (20% done)
• Integration to third party portlets content providers, according to existing portlets standards, and possibly a subclass API of the portal_syndication tool. (not started)
• Authenticated access for page owners' guests, for page sharing purposes.(not started)
• UI for setting up and delivering preset workspaces. (not started)
• Autoplugable stylesheets, to allow different portlets to use its own, while living in the same page.(50% done)
• Support for mobile devices.(25% done.)

The CMFPagelets Project

CMFPagelets is meant to be a layer of abstraction of all portal skins, by allowing to group important lines of DTML or PythonScript code in an identifiable unit named pagelet. A pagelet is renderable or not. A pagelet has plugs to page variables, and javascript and stylesheets repositories. A pagelet is ESI cacheable depending on its own properties. A pagelet is meant to be handled much the same as you can now handle boxes within CMFPortlets, with the only difference that what you get after performing modifications to your control skin is a clean DTML or PythonScript skin, even a ZPT, stored at the usual folders inside the portal_skins tool.

Related links:

CMFPortlets 0.5.2 tour.

CMFPortlets 0.5.2 Readme

CMFPortlets 0.5 screenshots page

Comments and contributions page.
I'd appreciate any feedback on this subject.