Portal Development

In the present scenario, though most static companies prefer to have a website portraying their products or services, once they have a discussion with a developer or even their IT department, this ceases to be the case. By popular suggestions and customer demand, almost all of them are forced or convinced to incorporate a whole bunch of interactive services into their web site. Which pushes the web site over the limit.
Portals should never be outlined spontaneously, but should be well planned and thoroughly tested if the coding is done from the ground up by a development team. It is better to have a confirmation that a sizable load test is also performed on the test base, with clearly identified test cases. I have seen many a systems starting to crumple when the load is put to them. Suddenly the devlopers and the team who worked on the system will start to get frustrated. The system which was performing very successfully when put to unit testing with a small number of random data, will start to pant puff and grind when put to heavy loads with projected number of realistic data.
Planning for features, and integrating features are two different things. For starting a new portal, just the core features should be enough, but should have a portal development plan, and a routine portal maintenance plan. The planning and scheduling should give breathing space to add more services, to switch layout, to give a periodic face lift and what not.
Though it would seem to be better to utilize one of the vast jungle of free and open source suits available compared to writing own code. Both has its own advantages and disadvantages. So before fixing up a CMS or a basic portal engine, the portal developer should be aware of the pitfalls and nooks. Adopting a generic engine means the portal development need be steered in the flexibility curve provided by the engine. Writing own code means more work involved in the CMS, authentication, user management and the umpteen other components available for any decent portal engine.
Currently for most development companies, portal development is nothing but integration of a portal engine with a customized design, or layout. This can be achieved by utilizing the theming capablities or skinning capablities offered by most of the portal engines.