The WordFrame Integra platform allows you to build a powerful community and social media oriented web presence from our standard Templates for web content, search, support, community blogging, forums, wikis and more. The user experience for members of a WordFrame Integra based community site just got even better with the release of Personal Portal. This new template allows you to give as much or as little control as you want so that your site's users can configure their own home page, after the style of iGoogle or products like Netvibes.
As usual, when it comes to design, Personal Portal allows you or your web team to do whatever they want in terms of look and feel and the clever stuff, because you have complete access to the CSS. Otherwise you can use one of our library of standard themes - it's your choice. Your site will have been designed with some sort of public face, but when your community of users log in to your private area, you decide exactly what they can and can't see, and what they can configure themselves. Personal Portal gives each user their own home page, or a series of tabbed pages. You will have decided on the kind of security access and group structure you want your particular community to have, and you will have set up membership and user roles accordingly. As the site owner or group administrator, you will be able to provide mandatory content for the user community - notes, bulletins, events or even adverts if they're appropriate.
The portal allows you and your users to configure each of an unlimited number of tabbed pages with 1, 2 , 3 or 4 columns in a choice of layouts (as well as letting the designer do something more clever with CSS if you need to). Within each page you or the user has a choice of two types of widget to create blocks of content. The first offers preset lists of RSS feeds to pick and chose from. They are from news sites and blogs and we've made it easy for you by organizing them in categories like news, finance, politics, sport, education, technology and the like. You pick a feed and decide how many news items you want to place in the block, and in which column. The other type of widget is a content block with our usual intelligent text and HTML editor. You can format any sort of content with graphics and links, or drop in HTML code. That means that you could paste in the embed code from a Twitter widget, or a YouTube video, or maybe details of events from Eventbrite. With HTML and the scripting and programming that is available within an iframe, you could link to almost anything.
Once you have configured the content blocks that you want to see, things get even easier and more flexible. You can drag and drop the content blocks until you get the home page, or series of tabbed home pages that work for you. That is, except for the areas of the home page or tabs where the administrator of the group has predefined the content a user can see.
We're really excited about Personal Portal, which is just one of a number of new Templates we are releasing. It will be available from Friday, February 18 this week. If you are interested, please contact us - we'd love to show it to you.