Yeah so I have been assigned to write about :
[21:24] Rahul: what is a portal
[21:24] Rahul: how to use rainbow as a cms
[21:24] Rahul: how to use rainbow as a portal
[21:25] Ramseur: i can take the bottom 3
That being said. I want to at first do some research and give my audience many blog entries on those three topics. I will first describe portals and their uses, best practices. I will give links[ my speacialty] as sources that back me up and introduce Rainbow Portal as the clear front runner on the .NET Framework. You may say ' what about DNN'. Well I say it blows. The UI looks ugly and its also in VB. Eventhough I have mad respect for the keyword languages ( not down for memorizing a whole bunch of keywords when you should man up and learn syntax ), C# just comes to me better as a C++ background developer.
Rainbow is a great system. Its just like any other open source application; it has quirks. However, these quirks can be solved by smart developers and numerous help resources. There are many groups, rainbow portal on yahoo groups is a good one. Rainbow portal is ok to extend but hey its better than DNN. I didnt even begin to try to understand how to extend that ugly UI. With rainbow, I can put any UI I want and make it a CMS or Portal system. With the single file module, I can paste clear aspx right into the portal. I can also by adding private assembly modules that are simply user controls. I however, like some cool functionality and prefer the full application method. My future for rainbow includes what I like to call an application tab. Rainbow has tabs that it uses to represent pages. Why not different types of tabs that do common scenearios? Like um the application tab. Translation, I can stick any application with any functionality right smack dab into rainbow and it works with rainbow's hooks on the outside. That I will give rainbow. They have good hooks. Its really easy to see if a user is in a role or authenticated. You can then edit the page settings and restrict by role. If they arent in the role, they cant see nothing!! Many applications is the first step of creating portals in rainbow.
Cheers,