Cocoon portal - first look

Portal

We are currently working on getting the portal and authentication components ready for donation back into the Cocoon project. And actually we are finished cleaning up the actual code and stuff. Now we will be writing some documentation and then the donation will go ahead next week as planned.

Here are a  couple of screen shots that will give you some idea of what you can then do with them. Remember that the look and feel is completely stylesheet generated so this is only an example.

Login

The first screenshot shows the login page. Here the user can enter his id and password. In the default, these are then authenticated against an XML file. Of course as the authentication is pipeline based you can adapt this to say authenticate against a database if you wish.

Portal page

The second screenshot shows the actual portal page the Cocoon user will get if authentication is successful. Notice how we have separate "blocks" (we call them sunlets) of information in the page. Each sunlet is in itself a pipeline (with the additional ability to 'minimize', 'maximize' and 'hide').

We also can have "configurable" sunlets (notice the 'MyNews' in the screen below). These are sunlets that can provide configuration and once the user has "chosen" the configuration then the sunlet "remembers" this.

In the portal page the user has the possibility of configuring the look and feel (such as colors etc.). Notice the links on the left for this. As the Cocoon user is defined as acting in the role of "administrator" he also has additional links that allow him to add new users and define the actual portal profiles.

Conclusion

That wraps up this first look and hopefully gives you some ideas on what you can do with the components. More details to follow.