One of the frustrating things with the last version of Liferay was not being able to combine certain things like forums. For instance, If I belong to 3 different communities it would be nice to see all the forum sections from all three communities presented in one forum layout. In the newest version of Liferay Portal 6 they have tried to go someway to addressing the need of having an application that needs to be viewed in several different area by creating what they call Scopes.

However, this is not an ideal solution and a user still has no real way of collecting all his or her data from all their activities into one neat area!

Coming up with a neat solution for this issue would give Elgg the edge over many competitors. It is something that to a certain extent Facebook has done better, but it still does not collect data together, but rather yells at you to tell you there is something going on.

When I log on to my profile/dashboard I really want to be able to scan the page with my eyes to see what is happening in my parts of the community without having to click menus all over the place.

The most obvious way of doing this is with a system of dockable widgets, such as are used already, but with more complex settings. For instance, if you put a blog widget in a certain place in your page, you can then define which blogs should be displayed and whether they are displayed seperately or whether recent posts are combined.

Likewise, with a forum widget you can search to add sections from forums that are available to you.

This kind of system also allows site administrators ways of collecting data to produce information rich sitewide pages.