Hiding portlets in the Available Portlets List

Question

Can’t seem to find a way to control who sees what in the Available Portlets List. It is obviously possible to hide the portlets from unauthorized users. For example regular user will only see Services Portlet in the Portlet Repository->Administration->Portal, while the user with more privileges will also see Export/Import.
However I have a number of portlets that I want only be available to a certain group of users. Let’s say HR should have access to the portlet and no one else. I could tweak permissions of the pages and portlets so that portlet will disappear from the page for the unauthorized user, and such user will receive an error if he attempts to add this portlet to the page. But he can still see the portlet in the Available Portlets List. Not only that means that user often has a list of 50 items when he actually can only use 5 (very user-unfriendly IMO), but there are portlets I simple don’t want unauthorized people to know about.
I thought Changing Provider Access rules will do it, but it seems to have no effect, or perhaps I just can’t figure it out.
I’ll appreciate any thoughts or ideas.

Answer 1

The portlet repository is a somewhat special page group. Enable item level security in the page group and assign the required privileges to users or groups of users to your providers/portlets listed in the portlet repository as sub-pages and items.
Also, by moving around the items and sub-pages representing your portlets and providers you can easily re-arrange the view of portlet repository exposed through the Add Portlets page.
Peter