Links in Labs 2

[adamw]

Hello,

as always, there is a problem with URLs. This time - forums and blog. Of course, links to posts should be permanent. To make the really permanent throughout the changing Portal and Labs site, I suppose they have to be of the form: http://www.jboss.org/forums?aaa=bbb.

On the other hand, it would be best to have the possibility that each project can have a forums/blog portlet on the project page (maybe even several of such portlets), displaying their specific forum, for example. However, links in such portlets have to contain information about which page the portlet is on, at least. And we won't be able to keep such links permanent for sure.

There are several approaches to solve that:

* do it like it is with our Wiki - have only one forums/blog portlet, and links would always point there; however, this won't enable projects to have a true forums/blog portlet on a project page (that is, a portlet which wouldn't be only a link to the "big" portlet)

* have [permalink] links next to each post link etc. This solves the problem, but requires more care and intelligence from the user.

* another way? Hold the "last selected page" in user's sessions attributes? But that would disable browsing two projects at one time and them having multiple portlets of the same kind on one page. But this also requires special redirects for forums and is not so nice ;).

--
Cheers,
Adam

[unibrew]

Hi

I also was thinking about this subject.

1. We could develop simple portlets which would draw first page data from Forums but all the links on this page would direct to main deployment and they would just forward user to jboss.org/forums (BTW. Will we have jboss.org finally?)

2. I have permalinks near every post and I could add functionality to add possibility of chosing it's root. But I don't think it wil work, users will still copy url from web browser address box and this one will be wrong.

3. ...

I'm still thinking about other sollutions.

Cheers,
Rysiek

[adamw]

Answering myself, and after having a conversation with Bob, here is what we decided:
* we need to get rid of /portal/
* all project links will start with /<project-name>/
* then it will be broken into groups: forums, blog, pages, other
* following it, will come the forum name, page name etc

For example, we will have:
jboss.org/<project-name> for the main project page

jboss.org/<project-name>/forums for the main forum
jboss.org/<project-name>/forums/dev for the dev forum
jboss.org/<project-name>/forums/dev/12452/462 for a post in a subject
(this implies, that each forum is named, there is a main forum and forum names are unique across a one project's pages)

jboss.org/<project-name>/pages/<page-name> for a project sub-page
jboss.org/<project-name>/pages/<page-name>/<window-name>/4 for a project sub-page window action

This leaves one unsolved problem with the My.ORG page, as users can place there any portlets - for example forums. There, we can have the [permalink] links.

--
Adam

[julien1]

jboss.org/<project-name>/forums/dev/12452/46

that kind of links is very good from a semantic point of view because the URI points to the resource : i.e the post 46 in the forum 12453 in the project <project-name> of the site jboss.org

now it's going to be tough for you to do that because between the forum and the URL mapper of portal there is the Portlet API + JSF layers which don't have really the notion of resources.

one programmatic way would be the customization of the PortalObjectCommandFactory to understand what portlet it is displaying and interpret the command data to properly format the URL.

there are maybe better programmatic ways to achieve it.

[adamw]

one programmatic way would be the customization of the PortalObjectCommandFactory to understand what portlet it is displaying and interpret the command data to properly format the URL.

That's how I want to do it :).