Ryerson U Funds Development of uPortal Editing Component

Toronto's Ryerson University has taken delivery of a portlet that allows users to enter HTML content through a WYSIWYG interface for posting in the university's portal. Ryerson hired Unicon, an IT service provider that specializes in open source development, to do the coding of the Simple Content Management Portlet. A portlet is a user interface software component that can be plugged into a Web portal to add functionality. The institution's portal is based on uPortal, an open source framework specifically for the higher ed environment.

The company said the new portlet allows IT administrators to create content such as announcements and instructions for display in the portal. The editing interface in the portlet uses a new component from the Fluid Project, an open, collaborative initiative to improve the user experience of open source software.

The portlet is available in a Jasig repository and is compatible with uPortal versions 3.2 and newer.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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