vs.dashboardmanager provides a templating mechanism for dashboard pages and a push mechanism for transfering portlets of dashboard template pages into the dashboard of individual site members or all members of a Plone group. Consider vs.dashboardmanager as a kind of remote adminstration tool for dashboards.

• add vs.dashboardmanager to the eggs and zcml options of your buildout.cfg and re-run buildout (under Plone 4 you can omit the zcml slug)
• either create a new Plone site using the Dashboard Manager extension profile or install it through the Plone site setup control panel

• use the dashboard management option from the Plone control panel or add @@dashboard-manager to the URL of the Plone site to see the dashboard manager. It will list the available dashboards. When installed from scratch it should say "No portletpage template available".
• create a new Dashboard Manager from the standard "Add" drop-down menu in the folder contents view. It is a standard content-type and available anywhere on the site.
• provide title, description and body text. This will be shown above the portlets the dashboard manager will contain later. Save.
• add some portlets (using the Portlets tab). The portlets are left as-is and may be configured to your liking. You may add up to four portlets here.
• push the portlet into the dashboard of a user or a group using the assigments tab of the Dashboard Manager. Pick a Plone group from the drop-down field or type the name of an individual user and push "Assign portlets to dashboard(s)".
• as a user that had a dashboard manager assigned to visit the /dashboard. It should show the portlets you assigned.
• a portlet page is a page containing portlets as its content and can not be assigned to users or roles, but behaves like a normal page. Add portlets using the Portlets tab. The portlets are left as-is and may be configured to your liking. You may add up to four portlets here.
• if the is not what you expect check the criteria by which your portlets show their content. I.e., the events portlet may show published events only, etc.

• tested with Plone 3.3.X
• tested with Plone 4.0.X

vs.dashboardmanager is published under the GNU Public Licence V 2 (GPL 2)

vs.dashboardmanager is based and influenced by collective.portletpage by Martin Aspeli. vs.dashboardmanager is uses in parts of collective.portletpage.

Thanks to Veit Schiele and Immanuel Diakonie Group for the funding.

Carsten Raddatz provided the german translation.