That's a good idea.  If the search results page used the built-in ad_table thingy it could be made to sort on date rather than relevance, etc, without much work.

As far as portals go ... try searching for "new-portal".  I get reasonably good hits on that.

The old portals package from Ars Digita sucked beyond belief and has been scrapped. "new-portal" is a new portals package written as part of the dotLRN effort.  It's been partly refactored then abandoned by Open Force (the authors.)  Because of this incomplete state we've not include it in our standard OpenACS 4.6 release.  It's on my plate to finish it and integrate it into OpenACS 4.7, which we'll be working on again in earnest in a few weeks once dotLRN 1.0 and OpenACS 4.6.2 are released.

Yeah, this is as confusing as it sounds.  We'd expected OF to finish the work last fall but it didn't happen, thus the disarray.

For now if you want portals you need to grab the package from dotLRN not OpenACS.  It works with OpenACS just fine but there's very little in the way of admin UI to support cobbling together of portals for users.  When the completed "newest-portal" package is released there will be upgrade scripts so you don't have to worry about being orphaned.

dotLRN has its own layer that automatically builds standard portals for classes etc but it's not been generalized ...

Of course ... if you're interested in helping us push the completion of new portals forward, you could come meet me some afternoon over at Common Grounds on Hawthorne.  I haven't even had time to take inventory of the partially-rewritten newest-new-portal to see if the datamodel loads without error etc ...

Though I've been too busy fixing bugs in anticipation of our dotLRN 1.0 and OACS 4.6.2 release to focus on newest-new-portal but I could certainly kibbitz and help you figure out the status.  Just knowing how far along they got would be a big help trying to figure out what's involved in finishing it.

And there are a couple of MS CS types from PSU who hang out there off-and-on and they're getting interested in OpenACS because they're both interested in web/db stuff.  I think they'd be pretty amazed to meet a grandpa who's a hacker, too :)

The new-portal you'll find in dotlrn works ... the partially rewritten newest-new-portal version is in the OpenACS 4 (HEAD not the 4.6 branch) as ... "portal"

Yes, we do this to confuse people, that's why, I'm sure it is :)

Anyway you can play around with the dotLRN new-portal package to see how it works in the dotLRN environment, and can play with the OpenACS 4 HEAD portal package to see how broken the partially rewritten/refactored "newest new-portal" package is ...

I'll be at the coffee shop by about 2:30 if you're not doing anything ... about 43rd and Hawthorne on the North side of the street.  If hippie Steve shows up you can play with his cell phone that gives his laptop unlimited net access for $10/month on top of his normal call plan ...

I think we're third on the list, after Iraq and France the US will invade Southeast Portland, Oregon.  Nader got almost as many votes in my neighborhood as Bush did ... maybe more, actually.