I have to run off and do family things the rest of today – but I just updated the portlet – and it works swell now in uPortal 2.5 – previously it did not work so well – missing commons-collections.jar.
A cool new feature is that parameters in the portlet.xml can be overridden by adding preferences in the uPortal admin interface – so you should *NEVER* have to touch the portlet.xml file.
Another cool feature is the mighty-morphing web.xml which works in either Pluto 1.0 or Pluto 1.1 without needing a patch – just drop into Sakai’s or uPortal’s webapps directory and let it fly!
Two important parameters to set in uPortal’s channel setup are:
sakai.host = http://localhost:8083
sakai.secret = plugh-xyzzy
And another fun one is
sakai.allowpref = true/false
If this is set to false – the user cannot set prefs via Edit-mode. Of course in uP2 you can disable the Edit button – but for portals that show the edit button – this pref stops pref changes from happening even if users find their way into edit mode…
If you want to hack look and feel – open up the war and edit “feed.vm” – a Velocity template for the output production.
Documentation is coming.

I made the following web.xml in my war – and it works directly in Pluto 1.1 and Pluto 1.0 environments – at least it works in Sakai 2.4 (Pluto 1.1) and uPortal 2.5 (Pluto 1.0).
I initialize the servlet with both sets of parameters (thankfully no overlap in names) and then provide two servlet mappings.
It seems deceptively simple. Of course this is doing wildly different things at run-time – but depending on whichever Pluto you are running – it sees what it wants to see and ignores the rest.
Comments/feedback please.

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