The initial thought was to make all of our modifications within the velocity templates. This appeared to be a horrible pain, rebuilding on every minor change.

After that we came up with the idea of just making HTML files within a seperate folder in Tomcat for the pages that contain new functionality like the iGoogle like portal page. This all worked fine and a lot quicker.

Because of that, we started building all pages in just HTML (also site views, my workspace, …). This again seemed a lot quicker to make changes and kept simplifying the things we were doing. In the end we had a completely separate version of Sakai in /flat, that can run perfectly happy next to /portal. This also meant that we reduced an entire Sakai instance into just 7 HTML pages. If we hadn’t wanted all the extra functionality from our designs, we could do it in only 4 HTML pages.

Having this kind of environment allows quicker changes without rebuilds, a possibility of a dev environment and a lot more accessible code for developers because we got rid of the Velocity templates.