There are a lot of new capabilities coming with the next WebJunction, that you’ll be hearing more about in the coming weeks. I wanted to tell you a little bit about the fundamental building blocks of our new site: “portlets.”

Despite the somewhat amusing name, they’re not what you might think. Portlets are actually “pluggable user interface components that are managed and displayed in a web portal” (See Wikipedia for more). In other word, boxes of functionality that can be added, removed, and moved around as needed to serve up the capabilities you need. There are portlets created by the Liferay community (the open-source portal environment we’re using), portlets we’ve created ourselves … and in the course of time we look forward to seeing portlets created by members of the WJ community. For our launch we’ll be offering a core set of portlets, arranged in consistent ways to help everyone get used to the functionality of the new site; in the course of time we have plenty of potential to make functionality available in a wide variety of ways.

The bottom line is that the next WJ will be a very flexible and extensible environment for displaying all sorts of functionality (content, social interaction, learning, and more) in all sorts of ways. We’ll be sharing a lot more about the details of that functionality in future posts, but it’s all built on a portlet architecture that opens up a world of possibilities for interaction that can evolve over time to meet the community’s needs.