Page functionality would be nice.
Its been a while since I've ranted so here it goes -
I've been looking at other portal software, CMS systems and general web stuff to re-architect our portal. We get many complaints that it is crowded, unorganized and its generally hard to find things.
A function I think would be quite neat / helpful is to be able to create a new page.
In Drupal, you can create a new Page to place whatever you want on it. For example this page - http://www.lumdev.net/node/3 - lists the Contribute page for LDN.
Why? Our portal is a giant mess of links off to other places. We're struggling now to move internal content off of our public site (don't get me started) so where does it go? No department can summarize all of their internal content into a small little square on the portal. You need an intranet of sorts, or the ability to create full pages that get wrapped in the portal layout.
You could also list help items there, you could allow people that have more to say than can fit in a tiny little channel to actually - get this - manage content in the portal! Something like this would rock in luminis.
Yea, I know I can create a link to a focused channel that contains a role-based targeted content channel that does a remote html page reference to a static html page I can manage content on with a 3rd party application like Dreamweaver. See how silly that is? Although if the Luminis people did add a 'new page' ability, it would probably be as stupid as the dinky little HTML "textbox" in the TC administration where you can paste 100 characters of html before you get a scroll bar. I'd like to see a nice WYSIWYG editor and a HUGE editor area.
Thinking more about it - I guess I could create a link to a focused webproxy channel ... but that's still stupid. - then you get 100s of channels messing up the channel list for people to manage their page content.
-Jon
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Amen
As Larry the Cable guy would say, "How about a button that just says pass!" - We have also strugled with what to do with those who are wordy, or actually just need to publish their content.
Possible - using LCMS...
Jon -
We've figured out a few ways of utilizing the LCMS to do something like what you're describing. Basically, you use the LCMS to publish "channels" to the portal (which are just standard Web pages). Using the repeat block and your programming language of choice, you can set up a channel that contains links back to the same page, but that reveal the contents of one of the repeat blocks on the page.
So, you can structure a "channel" like:
HR Links:
Benefits
Holiday Schedule
Contact Information
And "back pages" like:
Benefits
You have crummy benefits at your institution, blah, blah, blah. We're cutting back on your coverage and raising your premiums. You're not part of a union, so good luck in fighting it. You can't win..... (this can go on forever and ever)
You can include the other links that are in the channel in a navigational area on this "page", so that someone doesn't have to go back to the channel to surf the rest of this mini-site. You can also include teasers (or anything else) in your channel that link to big gobs of text.
There's another method that you can employ using the Navigation functionality. In your portal Web view, you can create a number of pages and then link them using the navigation function. If you have the nav tags on your pages, then the page that gets published as the channel will contain your list of links, and other pages can be easily accessed through those links and a little coding.
Both methods are easy for the end user - using the first method, they don't even know they're creating what will appear to be many separate pages.
Anyway, I've probably done a poor job of explaining this - but it does work and I think it accomplishes what you're talking about.
If you have questions, feel free to contact me.
Thanks,
-Joe
Hi Jon, We struggled through
Hi Jon,
We struggled through this same problem too at Hofstra. We came up with a workaround though. What we are doing now is using JSP to host the content (generated from our CMS) in a hidden div. Then we make an ajax call from the JSP page to a tab within the portal to get the frameset (tabs, footer, etc) to put around it. Then we take the content generated from the cms (JSP page) and place it in a div on the tab and now you have a page that looks and acts like a full sized page with tab navigations etc.
If the user is not authenticated when they hit the jsp page then they are alerted to that fact and then redirected to the login. Upon logging in they are redirected back to the JSP page. The benefit of going this route is that now you can link between JSP pages in full size as well as put these links in e-mails.
We use Cascade for our cms, but any cms will do. Publish the jsp page out to the luminis server in a web accessible folder (not the /site folder - we had problems rendering JSP on Luminis IV with this folder) and that is pretty much it. Our end users can create pages as needed and assign roles (it is a mess to do in Cascade, but it works) and they use the built in WYSIWYG editor.
Also we are having our channels generated within our CMS as well. All of our targeted channels on LIV make ajax calls out to JSP pages on the Luminis server to serve content. The channels have code to check roles and authenticated status and then render or not render as needed. This still requires us to create the channel in the portal, but at least the end user can update its content. It's not a perfect system, but at least the content is protected from viewing by people without those roles.
If you have specific questions let me know.
-Kevin