I just posted a first draft for the first three chapters of the ColdBricks User's Guide. The documentation can be downloaded from the downloads area within the ColdBricks site.
This draft contains a good overview of the relation between ColdBricks and HomePortals as well as a general overview of how sites are structured in HomePortals.
You can find the User's Guide here
Well, it finally happened, the old HomePortals is gone and has been replaced with a newer, leaner, meaner version: HomePortals 3.
This third release of HomePortals signals a big shift in the evolution of this project, not only because of the move from closed source to open source (LGPL), but because of the entire refocusing of the project from being a simple configurable portal to being a platform or framework that can be used to create and execute multiple different applications.
A lot of the code has been rewritten and redesigned, there are many additions compared from earlier versions, a lot have been done to improve performance but there is a lot of room to grow still.
Some of the main features of this release:
* separated HomePortals engine from the application, this allows applications to be located anywhere on the server (even at the root level!)
* added new types of resources: feeds, contents, html, pageTemplates
* added resource directories to manage resources and organize them into packages
* added a "friends" subsystem that allows accounts to be linked to each other
* added access control features for resources
* added smart caching of pages
* added configurable HTML rendering templates. Now you can modify the HTML structure of any rendered content. and more ...
And of course, with a new software comes a new website. Also stay tuned because very soon I will be launching another product called ColdBricks...
Well, enjoy!
