Designing a user configurable online community framework

Content Management Systems (CMSs) are widely used to create online communities supporting organizations, classes, and groups. These communities provide various functionalities, e.g. discussion forums, shared repositories for documents and links, collaborative spaces, and different communication channels, like chat or instant messaging. Often the range of functionalities offered is unnecessarily rich, and some remain unused, leading to cluttered users’ workspaces and difficulties in finding information. Currently, communities that are developed with CMS do not allow user customization. Even for the community owner (e.g. a teacher, a group manager), it is hard to customize the functionality and interface of a community, because this requires some programming skills. I have designed new CMS allowing users of an online community (both owners and regular users) to design and configure their personal view of the community’s dashboard by adding the functionalities that are present in the community’s homepage and arranging them on the screen according to their preferences