Design Confusion for IBM Struts Portlet for WebSphere Portal Server

IBM has done a good job in adopting Struts concept for implementing MVC pattern for WebSphere portlet development. But the concept, if not understood properly within the context of portlet, may lead to portlet design issues.

WebSphere Portal V4.x, 5.x, 6.x Home Page Design Flow!

Recently I noticed a design flow in WebSphere Portal that may leads to performance issue for portal pages. At first glance it looks harmless but when looked closely it revealed as a trojen horse. Ok no more suspense here it is.

Customizing IBM WebSphere V5.1 Page Administration

Have you ever tried customizing the administration pages of IBM WebSphere Portal V5.1 ? If yes you may find this article interesting to you. If you don't then try it out and come back to this page you will find it valuable :)

I recently got a customer requirement where the portal page needs to be customized similar to my.yahoo.com personalization feature. I have tried this idea before and I could not find any solution but now my customer is demanding it so we need a solution. One of the interesting fact I found was IBM Portal Server does not provide enough documentation and guidelines for how to achieve this customization. The only information we can find out is that there is a "customlayout" portlet available and you can customize the user interface for that portlet. But it is not flexible enough to meet the requirements for two reasons.