So, 'Rainbow Portal 2006' was released just after the fall developer's meeting in Italy.  Since then, the development list has been extremely quiet...no news is good news?  Hopefully, others are just working independently or taking some time to catch up on other things. 

I've been deploying commercial Rainbow Portal powered sites for a few years, now, and I'm at least somewhat familiar with most aspects of 'how it works'.  At one point or another, I've been elbow-deep in almost every dll in the portal...and I've been pretty impressed with the effort put in by those that have contributed. 

My point is that at some point through all this, I forgot how 'cool' the whole concept of a self-managed portal/website really is.  On two separate occasions in the past 10 days, I ended up explaining/demonstrating the portal to good people that aren't programmers and for whom HTML, CSS, and C# are totally foreign.  It was fun (refreshing?) to hear them shaking their head in wonder and amazement...especially since they saw how they could easily maintain a website 'themselves'. 

That's cool, guys (ok, it's 'nerdy cool').  My point is that the Rainbow Portal project has done good things for a lot of people...in a number of ways.  Obviously, it has provided an easy, powerful, and inexpensive means for plenty of people to 'get a web site'.  I've customized it to extend the useful life of (and interact with) a 20-year old property/evidence management system, with results better than I could have imagined (and saving an ungrateful 'customer' thousands of dollars in recovered time).  Dozens (hundreds?) of commercial web sites are running strong with Rainbow in the backend.  Along the way (as in my case) it has also improved the skills of the programmers involved in it. 

Hopefully this post will draw enough attraction from Google to bring some of the core Rainbow developers out to view it...thanks again, guys, and Happy Holidays.