Instant Portal Review.

Question

As I am looking at it I will start posting an evaluation of the Instant Portal App as I see it. Note these are only first glances of what I encountered in the “Get a fully functional portal running in an Hour”
First, thing I notice is the lack of a public face. I see two posts in this forum on the same subject. This just makes no sense. There really should be a way to include public content. Along the same lines, the aging and workflow of Portal was not used.
Second, the banner should be more customizable. There are probably only 1/2 a dozen ways to create a top banner. You should be able to select from a couple of style.
Examples:
Left Image Left or Center Title.
Search and login in banner.
Breadcrumb trail optional
The Banner should be able to have an image background.
The template should let you set or select the Title Font
You should be able to select between 1 and 2 levels of tabs on top, perhaps more, but at least 2 levels. Why Two? A person may want to have Departments be the top level Tab Then each department can have their own Page with Top level tabs. I suppose their answer is have a separate Content Area (Separate Instant Portal) for every department. But then departments could not see new content across departments in one place.
A link to the Tab Home should be on top of the Left Nav Bar. Right now if you click the Finance Tab, then Budgeting to get back to the Finance information you have to click the Finance tab again. This is inconsistent as the visual cue is that you ARE on the Finance Page already.
Should be able to Hide ITEM information like Title date author summary from being displayed on the page. You can set it to an empty string but then you may loose valuable info just because you do not want that displayed. EG I would like to see who posted an RTF in the New Content window but I do not want to see that Joe Posted the Corporate Home Item for the next two years?
File Item Image is not very useful and kind of hidden. You should be able to select an Image so you could show pdf, word etc. Probably need to add a file type specification.
RTF Item and HTML Parser incomplete (or to limiting). I pasted in a web page with an image and the image had a MAP. Everything looked great except the MAP did not work. So I pasted the map info into HTML Edit but every time I clicked over to RTF edit it would remove the map. Just as a check I went to builder and made the update directly to the Text Item in the Page. This worked perfect and the MAP works… Of course that is until you edit in Instant Portal and it strip the MAP out again. I assume there is a larger undocumented set of Valid HTML code that can’t be used in the RTF editor?
EG:
<image src="o.jpg" width="558" height="397" border="0" usemap="#Map2">
<map name="Map2">. . .</map>
RTF Editor changed to:
<image src="o.jpg" width="558" height="397" border="0" >It seems kind of dumb to arbitrarily limit or take a subset of valid HTML code in the RTF items as the RTF item is probably the only way to really customize and make useful content.
A feature for end users to export/ print RTF content to Word or PDF would be a nice to have…
So far it is OK but not really useful. It may take as it says a day to build a portal but it is not fully functional and by the end of the week it may be so limited that you are going to have to scrap it.
Other people’s comments and insight?
A

Answer 1

Instant Portal and normal Portal page groups cannot be mixed and matched, you can only use one at a time in the browser. You cannot export and import into the same instance and expect any new behaviour.