7 Replies Latest reply on Feb 7, 2007 8:31 PM by jimisola

    Needed functionality (requirements)

    jimisola

      Hi!

      I am checking up/evaluating different Javabased CMS (OpenCMS, JBoss Portal etc) for migration of a college alumni site and a related student union site. Data migration is not a hard requirement, but we have some basic functionality that we need:

      1. news: ability to post news to the site (e.g. last five are shown on the right hand side)
      2. picture gallery (with basic functionality such as category/labels, ACL etc)
      3. address book / contact list (for former student)
      4. forum / message board (nice to have: ACL)
      5. file sharing/storing using web, WebDAV etc (for meeting protocols etc, ACL)
      6. web mail

      Are these things possible with JBoss Portal today? Which portlets are needed and recommended?

      Does JBoss Portal handle multiple sites (different domains) with one install or do we need two separate installations?

      Also, JBoss Portal is not available for a feature matrix at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix/. That would be very helpful.

      Best regards,
      Jimisola

        • 1. Re: Needed functionality (requirements)
          jimisola

          Hi again!

          I'd really appreciate if someone would take the time to help me with some pros and cons of JBoss Portal vs OpenCMS.

          I really hoped that I would have gotten some sort of response by now on my questions. An open source project needs a good community just as much as a good product/library/framework. The interesting part is that Joomla! and Drupal have responsive communities that are willing to respond/help - while neither JBoss Portal or OpenCMS commuinties have been willing to help out.

          Once again, it looks promising but I'd like to get an idea of it before I install and test it.

          Regards,
          Jimisola

          • 2. Re: Needed functionality (requirements)
            antoine_h

            may be you can start with reading the jboss portal presentation on the jboss site (com and org).
            then have a look at the online demo.
            and then read through the reference guide, to have a deeper view.
            you'll find many answers, most quite directly...

            • 3. Re: Needed functionality (requirements)
              jimisola

              Antoine,

              Thank you for your reply. Sadly, it was not much of a help.

              I'm unable to find the portal presentation to be honest. I've already read product datasheet and feature list. The only online demo I find runs 2.2.1-RC2 which - from what I've read - misses out on a lot of the new and good stuff in 2.6.

              The manuals have had their fair share of attention as well. To sum it up, I did not find any useful information on the things that I asked for in my original post - which I why I posted it.

              I was hoping for an honest option on the different features/services, e.g. "yes, there is a picture gallery. but, it is very basic and if this is a key feature then product X might be a better choice.".

              I can of course install JBoss Portal, OpenCMS, Liferay etc and have a look myself, but I rather get some initial information from the community and then go from there.

              One crucial question is whether JBoss Portal supports multiple sites. I may have missed that information, but if it doesn't it is less of a candidate.

              Also, the documentation does not mention "recommended" portlets or Best Practices.

              Regards,
              Jimisola

              • 4. Re: Needed functionality (requirements)
                emilianoheyns

                I too would like to know whether Portal supports WebDAV in the sense that I could point DreamWeaver to it and have people edit pages and upload images using that instead of an online editor. It's the main feature I'm looking for in my CMS right now -- everything else (except "must run on Linux") is optional from my POV.

                • 5. Re: Needed functionality (requirements)
                  jimisola

                  After seeing a requirements list in another thread mine now consists of:

                  Content Management - CMS
                  User Management
                  Surveys / Polls
                  Discussion Forums
                  Calendar / Event Schedule
                  Sections / Content Types
                  Article / News Management
                  Links / Directory
                  Download / Document Manager
                  Image / Photo Gallery
                  Knowledgebase / FAQ
                  Contacts / Staff Directory
                  Business Directory / Listings
                  File Sharing / DMS

                  It would have been nice to know what features are support - either built-in or by using a portlet. A simple feature list in addition to
                  http://docs.jboss.com/jbportal/v2.2/user-guide/en/html/features.html

                  [B] Messages Boards
                  [P] Business Directory

                  where B = built-in and P = portlet

                  would be very useful as I believe most new-comers look features available in general.

                  Regards,
                  Jimisola

                  PS. Is the Message Board home-made or does it use JForum or something similiar? DS.

                  • 6. Re: Needed functionality (requirements)
                    theute

                    You should look at:
                    - The portal features detailed in the doc
                    - The portletswap.com website
                    - Google for specific portlets (JSR-168)

                    That said:
                    - There is no webdav support yet, anyone willing to look into that area ? I think Jackrabbit does support Webdav and we are using Jackrabbit already
                    - News/blog: it is being implemented by a team of students, no release yet. If you are willing to help them let me know, i can put you in contact.
                    - Picture gallery, i've seen a portlet to display pictures from flicker, i can't find the link right now
                    - Adress book/contact list, we have (had?) something very basic, probably not something very useful
                    - Forum: yes, it looks like this forum, it's a portlet though: http://labs.jboss.com/portal/jbossforums/
                    - CMS portlet, that's what we have. It comes with the portal
                    - Web mail, i don't have anything (it doesn't mean it doesn't exist)
                    - User management, yes, embedded.

                    • 7. Re: Needed functionality (requirements)
                      jimisola

                       

                      "thomas.heute@jboss.com" wrote:

                      You should look at:
                      - The portal features detailed in the doc
                      - The portletswap.com website
                      - Google for specific portlets (JSR-168)


                      I'm going to go through the documentation for 2.6 again now that I know a bit more - didn't crasp everything first time around obviously. As for portletswap.com and googling, those options have been used.

                      "thomas.heute@jboss.com" wrote:

                      That said:
                      - There is no webdav support yet, anyone willing to look into that area ? I think Jackrabbit does support Webdav and we are using Jackrabbit already
                      - News/blog: it is being implemented by a team of students, no release yet. If you are willing to help them let me know, i can put you in contact.
                      - Picture gallery, i've seen a portlet to display pictures from flicker, i can't find the link right now
                      - Adress book/contact list, we have (had?) something very basic, probably not something very useful
                      - Forum: yes, it looks like this forum, it's a portlet though: http://labs.jboss.com/portal/jbossforums/
                      - CMS portlet, that's what we have. It comes with the portal
                      - Web mail, i don't have anything (it doesn't mean it doesn't exist)
                      - User management, yes, embedded.


                      news/blog: I currently don't have time get actively involved in a/another open source project, but I'd would definitely like to have a look at what they got. Where can I find it? Is it the jboss_newsportlet available at portletswap or a different one?

                      address book: there are two address book / contacts portlets at portlet swap, but neither one of them have had any updates for almost twelve (12) months so I'll continue to look around.

                      forum: JBoss Forums is a nice phpBB clone. Does it have anything in common with JForum (which also is a Javabased phpBB clone)? It's feature list looks quite complete. Since I know phpBB it would be interesting to know if you know about any major differences between the two. I am especially interested in 1) PM (private messages) (not mentioned in the feature list, but there is an icon in the forum which, however, links to jboss.com) and 2) "Fine grained security" and whether it means that non-privileged users won't even be able to see topics and "Last Post" information. Looks as the same requirements that a user mentioned is this thread:
                      http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=98930

                      CMS Portlet: I felt that the CMS portlet was not intuitive enough to just start with and I also managed to cause it throw an exception :)
                      My goal is to migrate an existing JSP site to a CMS solution.

                      User Management: though there was support for hierarchical role/group management, but I got to know that J2EE does not specify hierarchical support and it was not a hard requirement anyway.

                      Regards,
                      Jimisola