I've been tasked with learning Vignette and setting it up is a nightmare. There are many different components in the wizard. If something fails, you get a cryptic error message and then have to start again. This is the worst "Wizard" since Kwame Brown.
Are there other Portal servers out there that are easy to configure, or at least seem to have kept a developer's sanity in mind during configuration?
To those that have used several different portal servers, which is your favorite?
I've heard really good things about the Liferay Portal, but I've never used it.
I spent two years developing a SaaS solution using Apache Jetspeed 2. We had a little hassle packaging it to run on WebSphere 6 but the issues we encountered were down to us pushing the envelope or WebSphere bugs. We really needed features that will be available in Portlet 2.0 (JSR-286). Specifically we could have done with the support for inter-portlet communication and the portlet resource API. However, they are limitations of the specification rather than Jetspeed itself.
I recently started playing with JBoss Portal. I found it very easy to get started with and believe that it makes it much easier to deploy things like portal sites, pages, themes and layouts. In never found a good way of doing that in Jetspeed without rebuilding the portal application itself. However, JBoss allows you to deploy them as part of the .war that contains the portlets.
I would strongly recommend that whatever portal server you choose that you use the Spring Portlet MVC Framework for your Model-View-Controller framework.
Liferay Portal is very easy to setup and work very well as a Portal. Just grab the Tomcat bundle, unzip it, and start using it.
I am not sure though I would recommend it if you need a strong CMS, but I don't have enough experience using it for other things than developing custom portlets for it.
If you need a strong CMS Portal, then there are some good commercial offerings, such as Vyre Unify that is easy to setup and develop for.
I strongly recommend that you also use Spring Portlet MVC to develop your portlets.
I've used Sun One Portal (open source version: OpenPortal) and while it is very powerful it is also quite difficult to understand and configure. Currently I'm setting up a Liferay portal an I can say that the setup is a breeze (just unzip Tomcat bundle and start), configuration is easy and mostly done in the portal using Ajax. The only problem, but one that can be solved is that the internal CMS system is somewhat limited, but if you deploy Alfresco you can use a special portlet to display content from the Alfresco CMS in your Liferay portal.
I also use extensively Liferay, as it comes with enough portlets to be up and running as a corporate and collaborative web site easily. However, it also has what is called the "plugin SDK" that helps you develop and deploy portlets using all the belle and whistles of the GUI. It is simply a bunch of ant tasks and customizable templates, very handy.
BEA Aqualogic now called Oracle Webcenter Interaction is a good java portal.
I use Liferay for development (it makes the business drool with AJAXy goodness) but am forced to deploy on WebSphere Portal or Vignette Portal. If I had any say over my production install I'd take Liferay over both commercial products in a second.
I use http://www.jasig.org/uportal, although this portal container is aimed at the higher education community, it is essentially an easy to use Pluto based JSR168 portlet container. There is a quickstart download available so you can get it up and running in next to no time. Incidentally, some of the guys heavily invovled in uPortal were also responsible for developing the Spring Portlet MVC Framework.