Patent ID: 7747677

Claim:
A system to provide portal rendering, comprising: one or more processors; a portal containing a plurality of controls, wherein the portal allows a plurality of users to access a website; a meta control hierarchy with a plurality of nodes, the meta control hierarchy representing the plurality of controls on the portal, wherein each node in the meta control hierarchy holds information of one of the plurality of controls; a portal managing component, that runs on the one or more processors, operable to perform: allowing the plurality of users to customize the meta control hierarchy and create a plurality of customized meta control hierarchies, wherein each of the customized meta control hierarchy is associated with one user of the plurality of users; compressing the plurality of customized meta control hierarchies by sharing sub-hierarchies among the plurality of customized meta control hierarchies; accepting a user's request for rendering one or more controls in the portal, wherein the one or more controls is associated with a selected node and the user is one of the plurality of users; creating a partial control hierarchy based on a customized meta control hierarchy of the plurality of customized meta control hierarchies, wherein the customized meta control hierarchy is associated with the user, wherein the partial control hierarchy contains a set of active nodes along a path from a root node of the customized meta control hierarchy to the selected node in the customized meta control hierarchy and all displayable nodes associated with each one of the set of active nodes; and rendering the one or more controls in the portal based on the partial control hierarchy.