JBoss portal provides an open source platform for hosting and serving a portal's web interface, publishing and managing its content, and customizing its experience. While most packaged portal frameworks help enterprises launch portals more quickly, JBoss portal delivers the benefits of a zero-cost open source license combined with a flexible and scalable underlying platform.

Here is a brief list of features available in current JBoss version.

TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURE

• JEMS: Leverages the power of JBoss Enterprise Middleware Services: JBoss Application Server, JBoss Cache, JGroups and Hibernate
• DB Agnostic: Will work with any RDBMS supported by Hibernate
• SSO/LDAP: Leverages Tomcat and JBoss single sign on (SSO) solutions
• JAAS Authentication: Custom authentication via JAAS login modules
• Caching: Utilizes render-view caching for improved performance
• Clustered: Cluster support allows for portal state to be clustered for all portal instances
• Hot-Deployment: Leverages JBoss dynamic auto deployment features
• SAR Installer: Browser-based installer makes installation and initial configuration a breeze

SUPPORTED STANDARDS

• Portlet Specification and API 1.0 (JSR-168)
• Content Repository for Java Technology API (JSR-170)
• Java Server Faces 1.2 (JSR-252)
• Java Management Extension (JMX) 1.2
• Full J2EE 1.4 compliance when used with JBoss AS

PORTAL AND PORTAL CONTAINER

• Multiple Portal Instances: Ability to have multiple portal instances running inside of one portal container
• IPC™ Inter-Portlet Communication API enables portlets to create links to other objects such as a page, portal or window
• Dynamicity™ The ability for administrators and users to create and destroy objects such as portlets, pages, portals, themes, and layouts at runtime
• Internationalisation: Ability to use internationalizations resource files for every portlet
• Pluggable Services: Authentication performed by the servlet container and JAAS make it possible to swap the authentication scheme
• Page-based Architecture:Allows for the grouping/division of portlets on a per-page basis
• Existing Framework Support: Portlets utilizing Struts, Spring MVC, Sun JSF-RI, AJAX or MyFaces are supported

THEMES AND LAYOUTS

• Easily swappable themes/layouts: New themes and layouts containing images can be deployed in WAR archives
• Flexible API: Theme and Layout API are designed to separate the business layer from the presentation layer
• Per-page layout strategy: Different layouts can be assigned to different pages

USER AND GROUP FUNCTIONALITY

• User registration/validation: Configurable registration parameters allow for user email validation before activation
• User login: Makes use of servlet container authentication
• Create/Edit Users: Ability for administrators to create/edit user profiles
• Create/Edit Roles: Ability for administrators create/edit roles
• Role Assignment: Ability for administrators to assign users to roles

PERMISSIONS MANAGEMENT

• Extendable permissions API: Allows custom portlets permissions based on role definition
• Administrative interface: Allows for permissions assignments to roles at any time for any deployed portlet, page or portal instance

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

• JCR-compliant: The CMS is powered by Apache Jackrabbit, an open source implementation of the Java Content Repository API
• DB or file system store support: Configurable content store to either a file system or RDBMS
• External Blob Support: Configurable content store allowing large blobs to reside on file system and content node references/properties to reside in RDBMS
• Versioning support: All content edited/created is auto versioned with a history of edits that can be viewed at any time
• Content Serving Search-engine-friendly URLs:
  http://yourdomain/portal/content/index.html (Does not apply to portlet actions.)
• No long portal URLS: Serve binaries with simple URLs. (http://domain/files/products.pdf)
• Multiple HTML Portlet instance support: Allows for extra instances of static content from the CMS to be served under separate windows
• Directory Support: Create, move, delete, copy, and upload entire directory trees
• File Functions: Create, move, copy, upload, and delete files
• Embedded Directory-Browser: When copying, moving, deleting or creating files, administrators can simply navigate the directory tree to find the collection they want to perform the action on
• Ease-of-Use Architecture: All actions to be performed on files and folder are one mouse-click away
• Full-Featured HTML editor: HTML editor contains WYSIWYG mode, preview functionality and HTML source editing mode. HTML commands support tables, fonts, zooming, image and URL linking, flash movie support, bulleted and numbered list and dozens more
• Editor style-sheet support: WYSIWYG editor displays current portal style sheet for easy selection of classes
• Internationalisation Support: Content can be attributed to a specific locale and then served to the user based on his/her browser settings

MESSAGE BOARDS

• Instant Reply: Instant reply feature makes for one-click replies to posts
• Post Quoting: Quote an existing topic and poster within a reply
• Flood Control: Prevents abuse of multiple posts within a set configurable time-frame
• Category Creation: Create a category that contains forums within it
• Forum Creation: Create a forum and assign it to a specific category
• Forum Modification: Edit, move and delete forums
• Forum and Category Reordering: Reorder categories and forums in the order you would like them to appear on the page

Please visit www.jboss.org for more information.