The company behind the Liferay open source portal recently concluded a "portal themes contest." A "theme" -- often called a "skin" in other systems -- allows designers and developers to modify the look and feel of the portal without modifying the underlying portal code. Themes are contained in
componentized .war files and usually developed for specific customer projects. The winning themes can now be downloaded from the Liferay site. Prizes in the competition included donations to the winners' favorite charities. Compared to other open source portal projects (e.g., JBoss, Plone), Liferay also offers a very large collection of freely available portlets. Liferay boasts a growing and active community, but as a technology it remains quite weak in key areas, such as clustering, personalization, and WebDAV support.