Predefined pages

[Jasha Joachimsthal <j....@onehippo.com>]

I have a use case to implement predefined pages for users. When they log
in, they should see a page with a fixed set of gadgets. The users should
not be able to modify the gadgets on the page.


When we started with the portal we only had 1 type of page that could
contain gadgets:
Page contained one or many Regions. A Region contained zero+ RegionWidgets
which mapped to a specific Widget instance.

Since then 2 new concepts have been introduced: the profile page and shared
pages. I'm trying to understand how a Page is defined.

Page has a pagetype. If the type is "User" then it appears as a tab in the
main area. There seems to be an optional "ProfilePage" which has multiple
"SubPage" pages that have the ProfilePage as its parent.

Then there's a PageTemplate type which seems to be mapped to the
"ProfilePage" and its "SubPage"'s.
The PageType is an enum in the code base. Initially it was a table in the
database, but that caused a catch-22 when you couldn't use the
initial-data.sql script to start the portal (some services needed to do a
lookup of the pagetype). This means that I cannot add my own page type for
a "fixed" template.
If a new widget should be added to a subpage, is that immediately available
for all users or are all subpages individual instances?


Another option would be to use a shared "User" page. The admin shares one
of his pages with every user that matches a certain profile. We would then
need to hide the option to unshare it. There are however several issues
with the page sharing:
- operations like delete, collapse, move or change preferences look
possible, but eventually return an error message.
- users that accept a shared page can add a new widget to the shared page
that is immediately added for all users that have this page
- users that accept a shared page share the same instance of a gadget. If
the original page owner has done oauth to retrieve data, this data becomes
available for all users of this shared page (which means my colleague can
see my google contacts or appointments).

The first two points can be solved easily by adding more checks. The last
point is a conceptual issue. Was this intentional or not?


So that leaves my question. What would be the way to make predefined pages
that can be modified by an admin?


Jasha Joachimsthal

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