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I would like to have a service like iGoogle or Netvibes, allowing my users to have a custom Web home page, with syndication feeds, gadgets, etc, without relying on a third-party and having to use its accounts and accept its terms of use ("We have the right to do anything we want with your data").

I'm not very knowledgeable in this world, I don't even know if the gadget API is standard or not.

More specific requirments:

  1. Runs on Unix (preference for Debian)
  2. Free software (free as in free speech, not free as in free beer)

In free software, a friend suggests me dropthings which seems very nice, free, well documented (there is even a book), etc, but which runs only on Windows. Any other suggestion?

bortzmeyer
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2 Answers2

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I guess liferay would suit you. It is a collaboration web app with a personal page configurable via portlets.

Liferay has enterprise (paying) and standard (free) editions.

You can try a demo at the same URL but ended in net (I am not allowed two links in a single post yet).

chmeee
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  • I upvoted (because Liferay seems nice and fits with my requirments) but did not accept it because I was not able to install it. The documentation has many errors (the names of the folders are not as indicated, the default password mentioned in the documentation fails, etc). There is OpenID support but which says "An error occurred while communicating with the OpenID provider. ". The strength of iGoogle or Netvibes is that any moron like me can create his portal in five minutes. With Liferay, even after I was able to log in, I'm still lost in front of a very complicated page. – bortzmeyer Jun 14 '09 at 12:49
  • Documentation has been updated. If you use a bundled version (e.g. the tomcat bundle) installation is no more than unzipping and starting up. There's even a demo application that will be running this way. Login is through clicking a link on the homepage of your new demo installation. Once you get rid of the demo content there's an initial standard account. If you don't want to depend on a third party, you'll most likely have to invest some work (or money). Liferay has a learning curve, but it's certainly doable. – Olaf Aug 01 '09 at 18:10
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A recent suggestion I got is Posh from the Portaneo company. It is written in PHP and, at first glance, seems easier to install and fits the requirments.

But it has, in my opinion, too many problems:

  • the security is quite poor, with requests in the documentation to set magic_quotes_gpc or allow_url_fopen in an unsecure way.
  • too many bugs, specially with UTF-8 rendering (for instance, RSS feeds are OK but not Atom ones).

So, I'm still looking for a solution.

bortzmeyer
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