Portalware

Definition

Portalware is software to build various kinds of portals.

Daniel K. Schneider thinks that typical portalware for educational use can be installed in an hour and be used after an extra hour of configuration work. Fine tuning may require an extra week of work (or more if the software doesn't work as advertized). In any case, we clearly want to make a distinction between portalware and toolkits to build portals (web application frameworks).

Principle

Portalware is a kind of server software that is usually installed within a webserver / database combo, e.g. LAMP.

According to Wikipedia (15:23, 11 May 2007 (MEST)), “there are many Web application frameworks which facilitate rapid application development by allowing the programmer to define a high-level description of the program”. In addition, there is potential for the development of applications on Internet Operating Systems (a kind of webtops), although currently there are not many viable platforms that fit this model.

Most light-weight servers that are popular in education, don't use one of these frameworks, but of course may include libraries, e.g. for database access or templating.

List of portalware

(uncomple, used in education ....)

Small Content management systems

We refer to content management systems in the more narrow sense, i.e. systems specifically designed to edit contents through a "structured" interface, contents that must fit designed templates, information that is more organized than just lists (like in blogs, or news engines).

• typo3: PHP and MySQL
• ezPublish: PHP
• SPIP: PHP and MySQL
• Plone (built on top of Zope)

Big systems

• An example would be Vignette (Wikipedia article). These usually cost over 10K and require rather substantial development investment.

Small Portals

We call most of these C3MS (since they allow to manage content, communities and collaboration). In pure CMS functionality, most are rather weak. Here is a list of popular open source software:

News engines

• slash: originally used for slashdot. Perl & MySQL

C3MS

• phpnuke & postnuke: PHP & MySQL
• Drupal (drupal home page): PHP & MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQL server...
• XOOPS: PHP
• midgard: PHP
• plone: Python/Zope
• Mambo Server: PHP and MySQL
• Joomla: fork of mambo server. PHP and MySQL
• CMSimple Content Management: no database needed, PHP powered

Big portals

• uPortal A kind of enterprise portal made for education
• Jahia Integrated Enterprise Content & Portal Management software. Adopted by some Swiss educational institutions.
  • Jahia at Wikipedia

"Web 2.0" systems

Not sure what that web 2.0 means, but we usually mean a subset of social software and integrators like webtops. It also relates to things like the virtual office (aka office 2.0), etc. Most well known systems are:

• wikis
• blogs

Special purpose systems for education

Many portals designed for education (both e-learning and blended designs) do have CMS components. In particular an authoring tool to edit educational materials.

• LMS
• LCMS
• Course management systems

Not that these systems are the only ones used in education, you may use all of the above in particular in more constructivist designs, e.g. project-oriented learning or writing-to-learn.

Web application frameworks

See

• list of web application frameworks (Wikipedia)
• Comparison of web application frameworks (Wikipedia)

Links

• Content management framework (Wikipedia). I'd call some it just portalware.
• List of content management systems
• OpenSourceCMS: you can try a portalware before installing it
• cms matrix: useful to compare the features of different CMS