uPortal Collaboration Recap from Open Apereo

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Thirteen people attended at least part of the uPortal Collaboration Days at Open Apereo 2018 to discuss what they would like to see in the uPortal project over the next year and how they are planning on contributing.

Continuing the theme of 2018 being the year of the front end, much of the discussion focused on a number of front ends that are in the discovery or development phase. You can see screenshots of some of this work in the University of Edinburgh and Unicon presentationon user-centeredfrontends, UW-Madison’s presentation on adopting uPortal Home, or in the Stateof the uPortal Project presentation. We also talked a lot about implementing frontends using web components. You can find out more about that in Unicon’s presentation on integrating Equella and uPortal or in Bryan ‘s presentations on his web components and polymer, web component-based authoring tool, and NGDLE via web components.

We also talked about the backend. This included the University of Edinburgh’s notification project (we hope to see their code soon!), release engineering, and moving to a newer version of Java.

After our discussions, we see a general uPortal roadmap for the next year to include the following:

  • Web components - focus on building new features and content using web components; develop conventions that will help with the reuse of web components
  • Search - make the directory of uPortal portlets/apps externally searchable 
  • Internationalization - continue i18n improvements, particularly in uPortal Home
  • Accessibility - continue a11y improvements and a11y testing
  • Quickstart - give it a fresh look and add French and Spanish datasets
  • Web presence - revamp uportal.org; retire Jira/Confluence
  • Java upgrade - continue work towards eventually getting on Java 11 as a long term solution
  • Documentation - continue incremental improvements
  • Testing - continue incremental improvements
  • Release engineering - research automatic releases


Of course, this depends on members of our community stepping up and doing the work! Most of us were exhausted by the end of the week, but left looking forward to the year to come. We encourage everyone to look at how they can contribute and help move the uPortal project forward!

Jim Helwig
uPortal Steering Committee Chair