LaScuola - Internet Portal

Name: School Portal for the province of Trento, Italy

Type: Liferay-driven Internet Portal

Platform: Java

Technologies: Liferay 5.2.3, Spring, Hibernate, Struts, EhCache, JSP, JSTL, Velocity, JBoss 4.2.3, Oracle 10g

Business challenge: integration of all the schools of the province of Trento into one common resource by means of an internet portal. And thus creation of a unique informational and educational environment that operates in tune with modern technologies.

Description:

The created portal allows any school representative (teacher, student, parents) to get access to the latest school news, receive information regarding school meetings, timetables, events, download the required material, discuss the emergent issues at the portal’s forum and much more. And what makes it of special convenience is that the required information can be accessed any time and the user can take advantage of it in any form: print the required material, download or just read it. To view the content of an attached file, one can do so just by clicking on it.

The delivered solution also simplifies managerial tasks of head masters, secretariat, and primarily of HRM departments, i.e. users with the correspondent roles can get access to the lists of schools’ staff and possible candidates for working positions, schools’ card index and other.
The portal uses classic tree structure, the nodes of which can be predefined by an administrator or the main editor. New content can be added through the control panel and also with the convenient drag and drop feature. LaScuola is based on Liferay technology, version 5.2.3. The given version provides the following submodules: Portal Extension (allows adding new functionality to the portal and redefining portal’s standard behavior and API); Layouts (defines content’s layout on a page); Themes (responsible for portal’s interface).

Workload:

In the course of project implementation our developers have significantly modified the Liferay’s standard functionality, primarily by extending and upgrading its features. To Liferay core portlets, Web Content List and Web Content Display, the following features have been added:

an option to filter content by tags and categories within a list;
an option to perform search and selection within a list;
get RSS-feeds;
using a list as an archive with an option to choose a year and a month
send a link to an article via e-mail
autocomplete for some of the form’s fields

There is a great number of settings for content display, such as: showing/hiding images for articles, adding a search or/and archive button, limiting content representation by categories or tags or both, ranging by date and/or by priority, amount of the published content within a page.

A further addition to Liferay standard functionality was a data import mechanism. So most of the content gets to the portal not as the result of manual input, but with use of this mechanism, where data is retrieved from our customer’s previous database.

A standard way of data publishing and role assignment has been changed. An option to preset a certain number of pages, where content should be published, has been added to standard Liferay functionality. Another improvement dealt with the process of role-based rights assignment and user groups-based searching.

Bottom Line:

Generally speaking, our cooperative work with our customer, our team’s first-hand Liferay knowledge, accurate requirements’ gathering process resulted in a very flexible and convenient portal, which is really easy to administer. And editors taking advantage of application’s strong features are making it attractive and convenient for the end users. The selected technology belongs to Open Source solutions, so our customer benefited to a great extent from having the project’s budget cut significantly.

We gather out of the box knowledge with each new application. Shall you be interested in our Java team, whose domain is Liferay and concurrent technologies or just check if this technology can be applied for your future web portal, please do not hesitate to contact our managers at info@softteco.com