Announcements Portlet

[Eric Maynard, modificado hace 15 años.]

This probably is re-asking the bigger (already posted) question of how do we add additional portlets to pages in SO, but I was curious if there was an easy way add the Announcements plug in into the home page of a site?

I understand there is very fine line that SO is walking here between simplicity and features, but I really feel that we need to have some basic SharePoint-like modules such as Announcements in addition to those already included.

Certainly, a blog could serve this purpose or even a Forum category, but I think that Announcements coupled with alerts would cover this functionality better.

-Eric

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 15 años.]

Hi Eric,

Yes, we'll definitely add Announcements to the next beta or GA.

We'll also be looking at the problem of how to allow adding content without cluttering up the user experience.

[Eric Maynard, modificado hace 15 años.]

Sweet! I think that you have a really good thing going here in terms of simplicity but perhaps you can consider an "advanced" mode or something similar that allows for adding new content types.

-Eric

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 15 años.]

Hi Eric,

Well I suppose one could consider Liferay Portal the "advanced" mode.

Meanwhile, I've added an issue for the Announcements portlet. If you have any feedback on how it should function please comment on the issue:

http://issues.liferay.com/browse/SOS-33

[Lisa Simpson, modificado hace 14 años.]

I think that the rest of the WOL portlets need to be added to SO, for sure, and not just the announcements and alerts. What good is it to list your "friends" when you can't add any??? Where are the images? When will you get document and image thumbnails?? Where's the tag nav? Once you start tagging documents, images, and stuff, that's going to be really useful.

And I'd like to see the user interface be more customizable. What's important to me (my calendar & project management tools) might not be that critical to someone else. Lay the pages out, if you absolutely MUST, but let *me* pick which one I want as my home page with *some* ability for the Administrator to over ride that and force somethings on to a user's home page.

Certain things, like the new edition of the employee hand book, need to be able to be forced out to everyone or to specific groups (say all the new employees after a merger) by the admins.

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 14 años.]

Lisa, some of these issues have been addressed in our second beta, which is due out shortly.

Layouts and administrative control over them will be tackled as well, but we want to make controlled releases of functionality after giving serious thought to user experience. We haven't had time to do that for these items yet, hence the lockdown.

[Mickey Fox, modificado hace 14 años.]

Bryan, while I understand your position with respect to the locakdown, it is extremely difficult to determine *how* and to what *extent* SO can be utilized without the ability to modify these things. I do agree with Lisa on this one.

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 14 años.]

Mickey, Lisa,

Thanks for your thoughts.

I think over time you'll see the control return to Social Office. We did leave a lot out of the product in order to make it more intuitive. That's not to say that some of the functions you're requesting aren't intuitive (like our drag and drop portlet positioning) or that there is no way to make other things intuitive (I think there are, just need to think them through).

That said, if anyone wants to "hack" SO to make it function more like Portal, it's pretty straightforward. Deleting the so-theme, for example, would make a lot of controls available again.