The JBoss Portal team is proud to announce the general availability of JBoss Portal 2.4. This release marks important additions, such as full clustered CMS capabilities and WSRP (Web Service for Remote Portlet) support. For a full human-unreabable list of changes/enhancements in this release, please see our JIRA notes. As always, you can fetch the new release (now with a new clustered version as well) from our download page. For some of the highlights in this release, read below...

• Documentation - Our new documentation guides add the following enhancements, aside from all of the guides being re-created:
  • Tutorials for portlet developers
  • Installation scenarios
  • WSRP configuration options
  • QuickStart Guide
  • Global XML descriptor definitions chapter.
• WSRP - Some of the new additions to our new WSRP implementation are as follows:
  • Ability to easily consume portlets from remote producers
  • Seamless integration of WSRP portlets in portal
  • Support for simple registration schemes
  • Simple caching of markup and metadata
  • Support for WSRP Base level (support for service description and markup interfaces)
  • Local portlets can easily be exposed remotely to WSRP consumers
  • Includes a local WSRP producer to easily test WSRP in Portal ('self' portlet provider)
• Migration - A migration application is available as a deployable war that provides an automated walk-through for those of you upgrading from 2.2.x to 2.4.x. This migration application will be a permanent fixture, accompanying every release.
• Scalability - Render-view caching for improved performance, clustered portal state, and clustered CMS.
• TestSuite - In contrast to our "we let the community test our software" competitors, we have added a Testuite that tests most aspects of the portal codebase and is run nightly in our QA Lab.

The roadmap for 2.6, is presently being fine-tuned. At this time, we will mention a few items that are already being worked on, such as full WSRP 1.0 compliance, CMS enhancements, and a revamping of our usability and UI (wiki| forums).

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

In the spirit of open source and transparency in the JBoss Portal project, we have been soliciting input from our community with regards to the next version of JBoss Portal and its planned enhancements to usability and user interface design.

The Portal Team has just posted a brief on what is being proposed as usability and user-interface enhancements for JBoss Portal 2.6. You can look through all the proposed changes, here. Much of the discussion surrounding these additions were open to the community in this thread, and I would ask that any further conversations over the proposed enhancements take place in the same thread.

Here are some highlights of the wiki article, at this stage:

Our new default theme:

Page-level personalization for users:

Intuitive Portlet Controls:

Dynamic user page-layout creation/modification:

We hope to see our community provide further feedback, regarding the ideas proposed in our wiki. After all, most of the designs above came directly from you, our community, and we thank you for continuing to help JBoss Portal evolve.

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo